If you missed the first part of my series, The Monomyth, here is a quick recap of what you missed": Aliénor is a servant of the Sovereign, who are an imperial force wielding a monomythic power that controls all of spacetimematter. As an Axiom, Aliénor erases candidates who could disturb the Sovereign’s grip on reality.

After discovering her brother, Eli, is the latest candidate to be pruned, Aliénor spends 47 minutes tasked with an impossible decision: erase all instances of her brother or risk reality collapsing? Choosing inexplicably to spare her brother, she is targeted as an enemy by the Sovereign, and before being captured she chooses to activate the Story Engine - the mythic device used to collect all that she has erased.

But what will she find within?

Part 2 begins now…

SpaceTime Coordinates: Miyasol, Standard Temporal Reference: 17,021 TA

Centre stage: a closed off pub in some cavern of a moonlit world. The crowd is a single patchwork of labyrinthine skin, the frustrations and anxieties of a people running through it like voluminous band, hardly ever meeting an end. You descend, shedding the mantle of flame and light, poised between worlds and realms, a soft cut where body fades and thought begins. You don’t enter this world as much as it enters you, and what is a body but an invitation, invisitation to all else, woven of wrinkles, scars, marks of time. The lids of your eyes close and open onto lashes, each one trembling with the weight of skin and the tension of nerves. Fingertips, lined with these nerves, lively, and to be enshrined in an earthen cage, with each vertebra, rib and limb entombing you, weighting you to the dust from which all flesh is born. Inward you are threaded through with muscle and sinew, each a woven cord and you are this flame tethered. You find yourself in breath, the gathering and giving of air; and in the hollow of this throat, your voice gathers, crafting words from breath, the strains of language, halting, lacking the incandescence of Song. With this voice, you take on a limit; you walk the path of dust – you are no longer light alone but matter, limited and yearning, you are bound to humanity.

Enter Milseán, exit Milseán, re-enter Milseán, summoned to stage.

Watch her as she feels herself, for the first time, for the last time.

Her having hardly enough time to capture and grapple with all the drama and outpourings of what is happening to her. For all the intensity of the moment, there are places her mind could take her, and there is no untapped region she is barred. The slender and light finger of her hand which, in a confused conversation with the bartender, passes over her fringe (ah, a fringe!), while in her other hand she picks and fingers the outline of a series of wrappings. She surveys it all, Milseán, finding herself, remembering herself for the first time, for the last time.

“What would you like to drink, something wet?” The elemental besides her mimes fruitlessly between the thrum of speakers, through the limbs of several more customers.

Milseán contemplates the question for a moment, every sensory input a door to some latent impulse, and she’s spiralling out in her skullfucked state. “Sure.”

She steadies herself by placing her hand against the glass bar-top – folds of sensation unfurl: cold, suction, sweat - places that were once body become space, and every connection and vibration sends ripples through her mind.

She turns and takes to the room, tired and alone, but preferring it to the noise of her thoughts. She has stolen a body, she is sure of it. How she has done so, she knows not. She then takes a swig from a glass abandoned on a nearby table (no, not ours),the drink foamy and cool, and swiftly sticks her tongue into the mouth of the first anima, a lizardkin, enjoys the cool veins, and waves the lizard off, takes a lick of the drink again, letting herself be carried forward by her thundering pulse.

She aches for the now! of it all, the throb of herself, insistent and fleeting.

Her hands move before she wills them. She touches her skin, and it is soft, pliable, vulnerable. A whisper of a touch across her collarbone sends a ripple through her body, a thrill. She is touched by her own touch, and it’s electric. It congeals in her thoughts, and there – beneath it all – the flicker of something else: desire. The taste of air, the weight of gravity, the ache in your muscles for moving, the burn of every step – the dull ache in your ankles and your heels – with every step you take on the ground.

She is, miraculously, alive for the first time in millennia. Not pruned.

A goddess returned from deletion.

She is an instance of the Astra – the energy of the stars and all the rest - taking some mortal form: in this case, a terran woman of the Ælfyen kind.

She muscles her way through the belly of the crowd, and on her second circuit, sweeping face to face, she enjoys the proximity but finds herself overwhelmed by the menace and passions emanating from around her. Groups everywhere chat, laugh, drink, learn of each other, whilst others don’t, others fight, flirt, smoke, and scream; it goes around the room in a dizzying howl of interactions, each group a closed loop, and she a wave flowing between.

It is on her second circuit that she sees him: Elighan. Eli, for short. She knows the name, somehow.

How clearly she could see him standing there in this midnight hour, garlanded in enchanted ivy, and his hair a snow-crowned mop. She lay her eyes on the room, adjusting, and all seemed sufficient, seemed worthy of being there, and then –

He saw me.

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SpaceTime Coordinates: Story Engine / Starship Simulacrum, Vespaer; 18th Millennia of Vespaer, Standard Temporal Reference: 17,021 TA

I am adrift inside something vast – an archive, a library of light and its structure vibrates with a chorus of voices, converging in harmony. The melody hums through me, an empty orchestra in the marrow of my bones. It is alive, almost sentient, like a second spine curling through the crown of my skull, branching into every nerve ending. I stand in the midst of the impossible, my mind flayed open to the Astra: the shimmering expanse of quantum realms folding and unfolding. My interface, the Story Engine, dissolves, its edges bleeding seamlessly into this paraspace – a place where stories lived, not as words or entities, but as nodes into possible realities.

I am its curator, I know this. This story engine: it knows me, and I know it. All that remains of my brother must surely be here, encoded in its infinite geometries. I am unmoored, tumbling through its kaleidoscopic churn of glyphs and symbols. They glimmer like distant stars, their meaning bleeding through my thoughts. Stories surge around me—beasts of lattice and light, forests of neural memory, rivers of liquid data coursing in ribbons of red and blue. The Astra has no fixed form, only motion, and I am caught in its current, weightless and finite.

“Show me the candidate!” I scream, my voice dissolving into the air, becoming one with the Astra itself. I need to find him here, inside the Story Engine. I need to know whether they’ve had time to prune my brother. To know he’s safe. To know there’s time yet.

The Astra complies, shifting. The fabric of this paraspace tightened and twisted like a muscle, revealing a scar—a rift bleeding red and black, pulsing, an infected wound. This is the abstract threat posed by Eli, but I have no time to make sense of it.

The air around me flickers, thread-thin tendrils of light un/weaving around me. The stories they carry shift like liquid now – luminous, malleable. Magic for the ignorant, the uninitiated. I reach out, and a stream of glyphs unfurls at my fingertips—sigils alight with cool sparks, feeding into me. These are the stories - the people, the memories, the gods I have erased. They are tales numerous: the tale of a three-eyed wolf, a raw pulse of survival from a dying people, a memory of a goddess’ resilience in the face of annihilation. I had absorbed each timeline, encrypted it tightly, folding it away like a treasured relic inside the Story Engine.

So close to the Chaos flickers, and at the edges the infection writhes—code fracturing under its touch. A Trickster sigil dances in and out of form, its blank face laughing in echoes that spiral onwards. The damage spreads, stories unravelling into broken light, the lattice itself buckling under the strain. The infection spread faster now, assimilating and erasing, fracturing the lattice of symbols until even my thoughts felt thin and frayed.

The Sovereign’s monomyth was here, crystalline and oppressive, dragging the small fragments of the Astra into their thrall. Their gods loomed, vast and terrible, singularities of meaning collapsing everything else into their orbit.

The ground ripples—a shifting plateau of liquid glass beneath my feet. My steps leave marks in the surface: letters, sigils, fragments of data scattering like the wings of startled birds. Vertigo grips me as the library twists and distorts, its infinite halls folding in on themselves.

I am somewhere else. The ground is a wasteland now—dust and shadows, puddles of light pooling in the cracks of a barren earth. A river flows through it, red and seething, riddled with recent history. I see faces in the current: my ancestors, innocents with mouths wide in silent screams. They reach up for me, stories written in their blood. The river winds toward the horizon where a tower stands—a singular structure rising impossibly into the Astra’s upper plateaus, its shape a perfect needlepoint, a pin piercing the sky.

I hear the zealots, the Cantors, their chant splitting open the story engine through which I arrived. I feel their intention; I know that they want to find me. A portent perhaps of things to come. They speak, and it is the same words repeating:

“ONE TRUTH. ONE TRUTH. ONE TRUTH.”

The chant multiplies, splintering and reverberating until it feels like my own bones hum with the words.

My body—it wasn’t just my body anymore—shivered as the air grew heavier, vibrating with that singular, flattening force.

“ONE TRUTH. ONE STORY. ONE WORLD.”

Something stirs in the river. A shape. A ripple of resistance. This is why I’m here. A foolish, idiotic plan but the only plan I have, here and now, at the end of my brother’s existence.

I feel her there—the goddess I retired aeons ago, Kali. This is not how the Monomyth is supposed to play out. This is not what an Axiom should do, but I have already turned against my kin.

I feel the goddess whisper into my ear. She’s gone before I can turn.

I shudder.

I look down. My arms writhe with life—words, symbols, and myths spiralling like snakes, fighting to hold their place. These are her stories, the old gods, the fabric of who we were. But the air continues to hum, its weight pressing down on me.

The Cantors’ chant grows louder. The air crushes the words, peels them from my skin. They twist and curl as they float away, dissolving into the shadows.

I try to hold them. I try to scream, but my voice is gone, and I feel myself cracking, my body brittle and emptying.

I compose a message in thoughts but he was already here. Eli. The Astra hitched again, the air thickening with meaning. Eli, a silhouette of sharp angles and flickering light, materialised beside me. Eli: tall, blue-skinned, luminous purple eyes, and cropped green hair that was not cut to military length. His presence solidified, casting shadows that rippled like oil across the shifting walls. The corridor ahead twisted and curled, a Möbius strip of possibility, folding in on itself as if unsure whether to settle into coherence.

A memory of him surely, an instance of him cutting through spacetime, or perhaps my imagination made material.

“I’m sorry I failed you,” I gasp, wincing in fear like a feral dog as all semblance of reality folds in on itself. Cut apart from all hope of contact. The apparition of Eli regards me cooly, and I realise that this is not Eli at all.

The air quivered with a resonant hum, low and primal, shaking the fragmented space around us. Symbols bled from the walls, forming fluid patterns that pulsed like a heartbeat. Glyphs crystallised into jagged shapes, arranging themselves into a towering figure that loomed before me.

Kali.

She is not of flesh, not even of worldliness, but is instead a kind of spectral idea of Kali – a construct imbued with divinity. Her silhouette flickers, unstable yet undeniable, every pixel fighting to remain cohesive. A face? A body? Perhaps, but they are only suggestions—fragments of what a goddess might choose to appear as in this realm of concepts and light.

I am dwarfed by the enormity of her. I stare up at her in awe like I would before a holy site.

“You return to me,” Kali said, her voice resonant. It was a statement, not a question, as if my very presence was an inevitability she had foreseen.

I swallowed, forcing my voice not to tremble. “I betrayed you - co-opted you. Trapped you here, within the Astra, so that the Monomyth would prevail. For all that time, I have been the oppressor to you for my wrongdoing.”

I fell to my knees in supplication.

“Debts are dangerous things to carry,” she replied, her form rippling with – what, amusement? “You burden yourself with their weight.”

I felt the sharp edge of her words but pressed on. “I am burdened, yes. But I must be resourceful. You have allowed all living things to be, goddess, because you surely saw something worth preserving.” I looked at the shifting goddess, the superposition of all possible Kali’s that might exist, and thought of the Sovereign and their Monomyth. The power to un/make realities. “This is why I have come to you. To ask for something truly impossible: your aid.”

The data-storm around her intensified, her shape unravelling briefly into a cascade of unreadable patterns before materialising. “Do you believe I would forgive you?” she asked, her tone layered with a dissonance I did not like. “That I would offer you the means to achieve what you wish because your survival served a greater purpose within the greater myth?.”

“I do.” I met her awesome gaze—or what passed for a gaze—with every ounce of courage I could muster. “Why else?”

“What if I were to act without expectation? What if you are already unburdened of your sins? And yet you would encumber yourself by the shape of your thoughts. You flatten worlds with your meagre expectations.”

“Meanwhile, the Sovereign continue to expand, Goddess. They are the ones who flatten worlds and twist the laws of reality itself. You know this. You have been the victim of said crime. You must see what they are becoming, what they are doing even to you.”

Her voice deepened, reverberating with a tone that seemed to shake the fabric of this space. “Your wars are fleeting; your struggles are distinctly mortal. What right do you have to compel any god to act? After all, could your enemies not make the same appeal to me?”

“My brother holds a spark worth preserving,” I began, stepping closer to the edge of her luminous presence. “I offer you his spark—not as something to take, but as something to protect. Guide me once more, and I will carry your will across the stars. I will be your instruments, your emissary, wherever the Sovereign threatens to extinguish light.”

Kali tilted her head, the movement unnervingly precise. “Your kind speaks with such conviction,” she mused. “But conviction is fleeting. What if you or your brother falter? What if your conviction shatters under the weight of what I was to ask?”

“Then take me,” I said, the words leaving my lips before fear or sense could stifle them. “If I fail, my life is yours to unmake. Bind me to your will, goddess.”

The storm around her flared, and I felt the heat of her scrutiny, as though she were unravelling me thread by thread, analysing my essence down to its rawest form. “You are bold,” she said, after an eternity of silence. “Perhaps foolishly so. But there is… sincerity in you. Very well. I will give you my aid once more. But know this—” The goddess leaned closer, her many faces a palimpsest which my mind best assembled into a face—a face that was neither human nor divine, but something impossibly ancient, etched with the weight of countless stories. “The path forward is the same as the path behind. All things are one in the end. But you... You are split. Fractured. A fragment of what you could be.”

She reached out, the monolithic figure she was, one of her glitching fingers brushing against my head. The touch was electric, sending a cascade of images flooding through my augment.

A future rewritten. A ship adrift in the void, its hull cracked and bleeding light. A tower rising from a sea of ash, crowned with fire. A man holding a burning blade, his face obscured. A mask shattering, revealing nothing beneath.

The visions burned into my consciousness, each one searing my mind with its significance. When the goddess withdrew, I collapsed to my knees, gasping for air.

“The future does not bend to the stories you weave,” Kali intoned, her voice echoing with the weight of time. “I will help you find a path into Miyasol,” her cadence both commanding and serene. The goddess began to dissolve, her form unravelling into threads of light that danced away into the shadows. But her parting words lingered, etched into the very fabric of the Astra. “Choose wisely, child of myths. For the story you tell may be the last.”

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Thank you for reading this story. If you enjoyed this — You can help me a ton for free, by helping get my work in front of other people. Leave comments, share and subscribe, and keep checking back for more stories. And, of course, more of me.

If you’re interested in reading more of my work, check out the first part of my new serial The Monomyth. It’s high-concept science fiction with a personal twist to the tale: what would you do if you had 47 minutes to decide between pruning an entire timeline or saving your brother?

Substack has renewed my faith in people and allowed me to rediscover my passion. I’d love to have you along for the ride.

You found the alien caught In a coiled bank of razor wire running around the perimeter of the Operating Base in Manchester. At first, you thought she was a corpse in how limp the body hung. It wouldn’t be until much later you would understand the Bright did not seem to feel pain like humans did, and so she rested in silence whilst her arms and torso sat enmeshed. Her features were well-defined, with high cheekbones and a blade of a nose, but the eyes were too large; the mouth marked with bioluminescent striations that pulsed faintly in the pre-dawn darkness.

As you approach, she begins to buck urgently against the new wire, opening up a bloodless wound: her skin parted along a seam on her torso, revealing translucent flesh threaded with filaments of light like fibre-optic cable. Her clothing - some approximation of human dress, but wrong —smelt of seaweed and ozone and something else, something your brain couldn’t categorise. She wore no chime, no identification, only a small device at her throat that pulsed in rhythm with her distress. You grasped the cold pale sheen of her wrist, just above the wound.

And you fell through time.

You are standing at a place you’ve no recollection. A red-bricked railway line leading outwards towards a series of sky-scrapers, pulsing with bioluminescence. Your hand is raised. You’re giving a signal you don’t understand.

Fire blooms across your vision.

Three shapes dissolve into light - a woman with similar eyes to the alien, older. A Bright tending to a garden with alien flora and fauna. A younger Bright painting walls with living ink. Their bioluminescence pulses in patterns your conditioning won’t let you read, but you feel them anyway: Protect the young. No harm. We forgive.

You are on your knees in dirt that isn’t there. You have never killed anyone. You are killing them now. You will kill them-

The vision collapses. Three seconds have passed. You blink and you’re back on the wire, hand on her wrist, her too-large eyes watching you. Waiting.

The conditioning kicks in. The vision blurs. What were you just seeing? Something. Nothing.

You knelt down and, against all your training, stroked her head—not hair exactly, but something between hair and antennae that responded to your touch. “My name is-” you began, then stopped. Why would you give her your name? She was the enemy.

But something in those eyes made you say it anyway. “Dorne.”

Then you gently lifted the struggling alien off the barbs. Once free, she turned slowly on her back, readjusting, realigning. Her bioluminescence shifted from an auburn colour to something softer, a blueish haze. You clamber over her and reach into her tunic, searching for concealed weaponry or a device - only to find more organic fibre - and set about binding the wound. You retrieved gauze and a tourniquet from a make-shift first aid kit strapped to your pelvis. The translucent flesh sealed itself as you worked, the light-filaments re-knitting.

There was neither a flicker of thanks nor relief upon the alien’s face, her eyes merely watching the speeding clouds overhead. You noted, around her neck, the seemingly dormant device: it felt warm and alive in your hand, imprinted with symbols you couldn’t read. In her pack there was a container of liquid that glowed faintly. The container was full and you offered it to her. Her lips inclined toward it. She drank. Water was necessary, it seemed.

Or something like water.

“Who made you?” you asked, neutral. “Did the Bright send you?”

Her chest rose and fell. She breathed like a human. She drank like a human. She looked almost human. But inside she was light and fibre, and something else entirely.

She did not respond to your questions.

When you hauled her to her feet, she stumbled, unresisting. Her clothes were sodden with dew, a sign that she’d been on the wire for a good many-hours. A layer of fog drifted over the ruined city. You pointed to where the rubble curved upward to the old railway line. You began your ascent and motioned for her to follow.

You looked back across the levelled city-centre. You had seen some things on your patrols of the ruins, but finding a live Bright like this - it was a surprise. At least you thought it was. Your memory was full of holes - the neural conditioning left gaps, made you forget things that might make you hesitate. It was supposed to help you cope with the trauma of what the military-industrial complex had made you do. Made you forget visions of settlements burning. Made you forget the screams and the horrors of war.

It was six miles back to camp but only four miles across to the research station. From there you could take a route through the flooded tunnels to command. They would be interested in a live specimen. You should call it in now, before something rose within her that you couldn’t handle.

But you were loathe to show such violence, even to a Bright. You believed in something - you don’t remember what the war has done to you - but it felt like compassion, like mercy, although you had shown neither in a long time.

You returned to a collapsed building, found a length of cable, and tied it around her midriff to use as a leash. You climbed toward the ridge, pulling her to follow. She stumbled and fell forward without bringing up her arms to protect herself. You would have to carry her.

You were tall and broad, augmented for combat against extra-terrestrial invaders. Now, you were stronger than you had any right to be. With the alien slumped uncomplaining across your shoulders, you staggered to the top of a market-district. You shielded your eyes and gazed out toward the skyline: three massive Bright vessels, organic and impossible, floated at anchor. They were the reason for the war. The reason for everything.

As you walked, fragments flickered: the Bright in a tank. You visiting. Months passing. Your hand pressed to glass, hers pressed back. But the conditioning took them. The images dissolved like his condensing air in the winter-frost.

The shanty-town market had consumed the residential streets—a sprawling maze of repurposed shipping containers, corrugated metal lean-tos, and scavenged pre-war shopfronts. Tarpaulins stretched between buildings, creating covered walkways. Bioluminescent fungi grew in deliberate patterns along walls and rooflines, casting everything in soft blue-green light even in daylight. The Bright’s transformation, domesticated.

People stopped and stared as you entered carrying the alien. Conversations died, leaving the still silence. Hands moved to cover children’s eyes or hurry them away. Not fear, exactly, more a wariness of what you represent. A sense of imminent danger. You are a soldier; soldiers still meant trouble.

The market smelled of strange things: Bright-grown vegetables with that distinctive ozone tang, standing water, rusted low-tech devices. Vendors called out prices in a pidgin mix of English and something else - light patterns reflected in mirrors, gestures you didn’t understand. Some doors were marked green - safe houses where humans had made formal peace with the occupation. But here, in the market, the line between resistance and collaboration had blurred into simple survival.

You moved through the crowd, trying to find the quickest route to the salvage yards beyond. People made way, instinctively, almost bidding you the quickest passage through and out of the market district. Some touched their foreheads - a gesture you’d seen before but never understood. Respect? Pity? Warning?

A girl of about ten detached herself from a stall selling scavenged electronics and strange Bright-tech. Blonde hair, bright eyes, the faint bioluminescent stripe of contamination along her temple marking her as second-generation occupation. She followed you openly, no fear in her gait.

“Who’s that on your back, soldier?”

You didn’t slow. “Keep moving.”

“Is she hurt?” The girl skipped to keep pace. “Is that why you’re carrying her?”

You lowered the alien to the ground, adjusting the cable leash. The girl approached cautiously now, but still too close for someone who should know soldiers and Bright didn’t mix well.

“Is she hurt?”

“Yes.”

“So why doesn’t she cry?”

“Because she’s not quite human,” you said.

“She looks human.”

“She’s not as heavy as a human. The Bright made her. Or grew her. I don’t know which.”

“Like a doll?” asked the girl.

“Perhaps.”

“My dad found one in the canal,” she said. “She wasn’t a real person either.”

You disregard the folktales, which the children are often fond of.

The girl looked at you strangely. “Are you sick, soldier?”

Before you could answer, a woman pushed through the small crowd that had gathered. Older, fifties maybe, with the weathered look - the hooded eyes of someone who’d survived the first bombardment and everything since. She wore a battered jacket with a yellow armband - some kind of local authority: the warden.

“Soldier.” She voice carried the weight of someone used to being obeyed, even by the military. “What are you doing with that Bright?”

You straightened. “Following orders. Taking a specimen to the research station for processing.”

“Processing.” The warden’s lip curled. “You mean interrogation.”

“I mean research. Understanding the enemy - their motivations, their abilities.”

“Enemy.” The warden looked at the alien, then at the market around you - the Bright-light, the hybrid goods, the contaminated children playing between stalls. “We made peace with them here. Two years of peace. No attacks, no raids. They grow food we can eat. They cleanse our water. They even heal our sick sometimes.” She stepped closer. “And then a soldier like you come through, dragging one of them in chains, reminding everyone that somewhere out there, you’re all still trying to kill each other.”

During the first bombardment, you had stood in this very yard, in full combat armour, enhanced and dangerous, and asked this woman for help finding survivors. You remembered her face in the spotlights, terrified of you even though you were human. This is the constant, dragging reminder that everything has changed. Bitterly, suddenly, you wonder if this is to be the pattern of your new existence. You look to the alien, and she leans against you, gently, and maybe she is trying to communicate something to you. On the other hand, she could have fallen into you in place of toppling over you.

You felt anger rising, but the conditioning kept it controlled. “The Bright are transforming the planet. Changing it into something humans can’t survive in. That’s not peace; that’s occupation.”

“And what do you call what we had before? Before they came?” The warden gestured at the shanty-town. “This used to be a town. Thousands of people - schools, pubs, shops. Then the economy collapsed. Then the water wars. Then the plagues. We were dying before they ever arrived. At least now we have a chance.”

“You have collaboration,” you said flatly.

The warden’s jaw tightened. But before she could respond, the girl spoke up.

“My dad says the one they found in the canal was trying to get away from the fighting. He says she was scared. He says the soldiers at the research station hurt her trying to get information.”

“Angie.” The warden’s voice was sharp, a warning.

But Angie ignored him, looking at the alien with something like recognition. “She’s trying to tell you something. Can’t you see her light patterns?”

You looked down. The alien’s bioluminescence was pulsing slowly, rhythmically. Not distress now. Something else. The girl seemed to understand it better than you did.

“Angie, go back to your mother’s stall.”

“But -”

“Now.”

“You had an operation to take out your memories,” she said, with the casual cruelty of a child. “We all know about it.”

Angie backed away reluctantly, but her eyes stayed on the alien.

The warden turned back to you. “I can’t stop you. You’ve got your orders, you’ve got the authority of the military, sure, and you’ve got whatever conditioning they’ve given you.” She paused. “But I’m asking you, as one human to another, before that conditioning took whatever you used to be: please, think about what you’re doing. The people here made peace with them. Don’t bring your war into our market.”

You met her gaze. For a moment, something flickered - a memory of who you’d been before the neural blocks, before the war. Someone who might have understood what the warden was saying.

Then the conditioning reasserted itself. The Bright were the enemy. This was a war zone. These people were compromised, contaminated, collaborators.

“I have my orders,” you said.

The warden stepped aside. “Then I pity you, soldier. I really do.”

As you bent down to adjust the alien’s weight, she stirred. Ran one hand along her arm where the wound had been. Then her hand reached out—just touching your wrist.

Her bioluminescence pulsed: three s h o r t flashes, one l o n g , three s h o r t again.

The vision slammed back, but stronger this time. You in a room with her, sitting across a chess board. She moves a piece wrong on purpose. You laugh. Her light pulsing a response you almost understand.

You stumbling through her language like a child. Her patience endless.

Her showing you a settlement. The northern valleys. You memorizing every detail. Not knowing that in nine months command would give you orders. That you would remember everything she’d shown you just in time to -

Her showing you a settlement. The northern valleys. You memorizing every detail. Not knowing that in nine months command would give you orders. That you would remember everything she’d shown you just in time to—

“She’s trying to tell you something,” Angie called from her mother’s stall, too far away to have heard the warden’s dismissal work. “Can’t you hear her?”

You yanked your hand away. The conditioning reasserted itself. The vision vanished. The alien was just the enemy. The market was just a place you needed to leave.

“The research station will know what she’s for,” you muttered, heaving the alien back onto your shoulder.

You pushed through the crowd, leaving the warden and Angie and the strange peace of the market behind. Something was waking inside the alien, and you needed to move. You needed to get her contained before she could activate her powers. Before the future memories became impossible to forget.

At the old railway line, you rested. A tension had formed in her body. You balanced her head on your lap and worked the tension away. She took a deep breath, like a human would during a crisis.

The station still occupied the old industrial complex, and the survivors who lived in the surrounding structures worked there much as they worked for anyone who could offer protection and food. With the trains gone, few outsiders came. You were known to the people working the salvage yards. Their evasive expressions paid you your due.

You took out her container, sipped. Faintly effervescent, strange-tasting. She reached for it. You pressed it into her hand. She drank, her eyes watching you.

A flash: this exact moment, months from now. You by a tank, offering her container. Your hands touching through glass. The ritual of it. The tenderness. The slow erosion of your conditioning until you could feel again—

Gone. You shook your head. The conditioning wouldn’t let it stick.

To forgive:

pardon excuse absolve let off forget to know to love

The intensity of her feelings come unbidden, overwhelming his neutral demeanour, shattering his focus into a web of loosely-linked feelings.

But as you lifted her again, as her too-large eyes met yours, something passed between you. Not words. Not even thoughts exactly. Just... understanding. She knew where you were taking her. She knew what would happen. And she wasn’t afraid.

She was only sad.

sad pensive pessimistic mournful sorry devastated regret

You carried her into the research station as the sun rose over the ruins. And by the time you set her down in the examination room, you knew three things:

You call her Sheen - the pale sheen of her skin, the sheen of light beneath her surface.

She had come to find you specifically.

And you were going to fall for her.

The rest dissolved. The conditioning made you forget. Made you start fresh, unknowing, innocent.

Exactly as the war required.

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Thank you for reading this story. If you enjoyed this — You can help me a ton for free, by helping get my work in front of other people. Leave comments, share and subscribe, and keep checking back for more stories. And, of course, more of me.

If you’re interested in reading more of my work, check out the first part of my new serial The Monomyth. It’s high-concept science fiction with a personal twist to the tale: what would you do if you had 47 minutes to decide between pruning an entire timeline or saving your brother?

Substack has renewed my faith in people and allowed me to rediscover my passion. I’d love to have you along for the ride.

Written for ’s Power-Up Prompt 14.

Element 1: Setting - The Corrupted City

Element 2: Character(s) - The Retired Detective

Element 3: Conflict - The Cold Case

XII

March 15th, 2087 - 11:47 PM

Detective Aria Cross stands in the neural facility’s control room, her bloodied and trembling hand hovering over the emergency shutdown switch. Rows of containment tanks stretch into the shadows, each housing someone who asked the wrong questions or dared to remember. The city’s disappeared, reduced to floating bodies.

She found Rebecca Morrison three minutes earlier—not in a tank, but in the director’s office, very much alive and wearing the uniform of a Neural Compliance Officer. Rebecca’s eyes held no recognition of their shared past. They had scrubbed her clean and rebuilt her as their perfect enforcer.

“You’re here again, Aria,” Rebecca says across from her, neural editor clasped in hand. “It’s too late. This facility processes four hundred subjects daily across our forty-seven tanks. We’ve achieved ninety-seven percent compliance across the metropolitan area.”

Aria’s hand trembles as she reaches for the shutdown lever. Her quantum recall surges with an urgency - someone she loved beyond reason is counting on her - but she cannot remember who or why.

“Your daughter volunteered for the programme, you know,” Rebecca continues. “Detective Emily Cross. She believed in our mission. She personally asked that we support you in selective forgetting when your investigation threatened to expose us.”

The name Emily triggers a cascade of emotions Aria doesn’t understand: love, rage, grief. Her quantum memories can’t store concrete facts, but they preserve the emotions, and she burns with the intensity of a lifetime’s devotion. Right now, her mind is screaming that Emily is in danger.

Aria’s hand closes on the shutdown switch.

XI

March 15th, 2087 - 8:23 PM

Aria descends through maintenance shafts she navigated in previous cycles, following a route her body remembers even when her mind doesn’t. Her clothes reek of three days spent sleeping in her car. Her fingers shake from too much caffeine and too little rest.

The containment level sprawls beneath the city like a technological catacomb. Forty-seven bio-suspension tanks house the facility’s subjects, their neural crowns pulsing with stolen thoughts. Aria recognises faces from missing person reports—journalists, activists, cops who investigated the wrong cases.

Tank #23 should contain Rebecca Morrison, according to the facility schematics she found. Instead, it holds a young woman with Aria’s nose and her father’s dark eyes. The nameplate reads: “E. CROSS - MEMORY EXTRACTION IN PROGRESS.” There is no recognition in her eyes.

Aria’s quantum recall explode with emotion she cannot fathom, and yet an intensity of feeling overwhelms her - the fierce, protective love that transforms ordinary people into warriors. She doesn’t remember this person, but her entire being in this moment tells her that she should. Tells her that she knows the weight of holding her as a baby, knows the pride of watching her graduate, and knows the terror of losing her.

“Your daughter’s been here for eight months,” says Dr. Voss, emerging from around a corner, arms spread in placation. “She was investigating the Morrison case when we recruited her. Very dedicated officer. She insisted on taking the assignment to monitor you.”

“Recruited her how?”

“Detective Emily Cross designed your editing protocols. Every planted clue, every carefully orchestrated discovery - all crafted to keep you investigating in controlled circles while we perfected our population-scale programs. When you wouldn’t toe the line, we rebuilt her. Time and time again.”

Aria stares at the woman in the tank. Emily’s eyes are open, aware, but there is still no recognition - lights on but nobody home.

“For a time, Emily developed the same quantum memory resistance you have. Started remembering her original mission, started trying to warn you. So we had to move her from handler to subject.”

The tank’s drain cycle activates.

X

March 15th, 2087 - 06:07 AM

Aria wakes to the sound of sobbing. It takes her a few seconds to realise the sound is coming from her own throat. Her quantum recall are overwhelming her—waves of maternal love and protective rage that her conscious mind can’t explain. She doesn’t know who she’s grieving for, but the loss feels like a kind of death itself.

Maybe she’s grieving her own shallow sense of herself.

On her nightstand, her phone displays a video message she doesn’t remember recording. Her own face looks back at her, but younger, more determined:

“Aria, this is cycle eleven. I’ve figured out how to record messages during the brief window after editing before the neural dampener stabilises our thoughts - neuters us. Listen carefully, you have a daughter. Her name is Emily. She’s a detective, like us. And they’re using her to destroy us both.”

The video-Aria’s eyes are red with crying, her voice breaking with exhaustion and grief:

“I can’t remember her face anymore, can’t remember her voice or her laugh or any of the thousand moments that made her real to me. But my body remembers loving her more than life itself. They’ve taken our daughter, Aria, and they’re using her against us somehow. I can feel it in my bones even when my mind is empty.”

The video cuts to shaky footage of the neural facility:

“This is where they took her. I can’t remember how I know this, but every quantum impression I have screams that she’s trapped in there. Save her. Please. Even if you can’t remember why it matters, trust your instincts.”

The message auto-deletes as Aria watches. But the quantum impressions remain: a mother’s desperate plea to protect her child, even though she can’t remember having a child.

Aria dresses with mechanical precision and heads for her car, following instincts burned deeper than memory.

IX

March 13th, 2087 - 11:45 PM

Aria finds the photographs hidden in her oven’s unused broiler compartment—the one place her paranoid past-self calculated they’d never look. Twenty-seven images documenting weeks of surveillance, each representing hours of patient observation she can’t remember conducting. Her hands shake as she realises she’s been living a double life even she can’t remember.

The photos show shift changes at six-hour intervals, security rotations, loading dock vulnerabilities during early morning hours. On the back of each photo, she’s written tactical notes in a handwriting that looks like hers. Desperate, blotchy, scrawled messages:

“Loading dock unmonitored 3-4 AM.”
“Emergency tunnels connect to old subway system.”
“Tank level accessible through maintenance shaft B-7.”

But the most disturbing photo shows her sitting in her car outside the facility, clearly visible through the windshield. Someone else took this picture. Someone else has been documenting her investigation.

Who watches the watcher?

Clipped to the final photo is a note in different handwriting—steadier, neater script:

“Please don’t blame yourself for what they made you do to me. -E”

Aria stares at the signature. The letter ‘E’ triggers her recall, but her conscious mind remains blank. Who is E?

She drives to the facility, following the tactical notes she left herself, guided by emotions she doesn’t understand.

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VIII

March 10th, 2087 - 2:15 PM

Mrs. Patterson brings Aria a casserole, but her neighbour’s eyes hold a clarity that doesn’t match her neural port’s steady blue glow. Aria has learned to spot the signs of someone fighting their programming. Her neural port pulses erratically: a sign of resistance Aria has learned to recognise in herself and others.

“You asked me to document your episodes,” Mrs. Patterson whispers while glancing nervously at the security cameras that monitor resident behaviour under the guise of traffic surveillance. “The crying at night, the way you call out for someone named Emily. It’s getting worse.”

Aria feels a jolt of emotion at the name—a sense of terror interlaced with an indescribable warmth—but her conscious mind remains dulled.

“Who’s Emily?”

“I don’t know. But twice now, I’ve watched you break down in your driveway, screaming her name. Then the next morning, it’s like this. You act like nothing happened. You’re oblivious.”

Mrs. Patterson guides Aria into her kitchen, pointing to a hidden camera she’s rigged to record jerry-rigged from old electronics.

“I started filming your episodes after the third one. Look.”

The footage shows Aria in her pyjamas at 6 AM, pounding on her car windows and screaming: “Where is she? What did you do with Emily? She’s just a baby, she’s my baby. Bring her home!”

On the recording, Aria appears to be speaking to someone in the vehicle’s backseat, someone the camera cannot detect.

“They’re doing it to us all,” Mrs. Patterson whispers, pointing imperceptibly to her neural port. “Whatever they edited from your memories fights to return. The emotional residue breaks through their suppression technology.”

Aria watches herself on the video, sees the raw anguish on her own face, and feels an echo of it in her chest—a hollow space where someone important used to live.

“Mrs. Patterson, do I have children?”

“I don’t know, dear. But you love someone with the desperation of a mother who’s lost her child.”

VII

March 8th, 2087 - 6:30 AM

Aria discovers she’s been systematically stealing evidence from police evidence storage, using her retired detective credentials to access cold case files during shift changes. The boxes in her garage contain three months worth of elaborate and careful theft. She has reconstructed the Morrison case piece by piece, following investigative instincts that survived memory editing.

The Morrison file reveals clear signs of tampering: witness statements removed, forensic evidence misfiled, key photographs missing. But Aria has been methodically reconstructing the case using her knowledge of police procedures and evidence handling.

Her handwritten notes show increasingly sophisticated detective work:

“Morrison’s husband claims she left at 9 PM on March 3rd, 2072. But neighbor saw lights on until 11 PM. Husband’s timeline inconsistent.”

“Blood spatter pattern wrong for domestic violence. Quantity suggests superficial cuts, not fatal wounds. Scene likely staged.”

“Morrison’s car found at Metro Station. Security footage deleted. Inside job.”

But the most revealing document is a psychiatric evaluation dated six months ago: “Patient exhibits severe maternal attachment to unknown individual. Quantum memory fragments suggest traumatic separation from child. Recommend continued editing to prevent complete psychological breakdown.”

Aria realises she’s not investigating Rebecca Morrison’s disappearance - she’s investigating her own mental breakdown. Something was taken from her that her psyche cannot process losing.

At the bottom of the evidence box, she finds a child’s drawing in crayon: a stick figure woman in a police uniform labeled “MUMMY” and a smaller figure labeled “ME.” The drawing is signed “Emily, age 6.”

Aria stares at the drawing, emboldened by a sudden feeling of pride, but her conscious mind cannot attach these emotions to any sense of who Emily might be.

VI

March 5th, 2087 - 9:22 PM

Hidden inside a false bottom in her kitchen drawer, Aria finds a handwritten journal documenting twelve cycles of investigation and memory editing. Her handwriting deteriorates across the pages as the cycles take their toll:

Cycle 1: “Something’s wrong with my retirement. Can’t remember deciding to leave the force.”

Cycle 4: “They’re editing my memories every 6 weeks. I think there’s something I’m supposed to remember. I’ve been finding messages, from me - from me before treatments. Messages about family.”

Cycle 8: “Quantum recall getting stronger. Keep having maternal feelings but can’t remember children. Did I have children?”

Cycle 11: “THEY TOOK MY DAUGHTER. Can’t remember her face but my body knows I’m a mother. The grief is going to kill me if I can’t find her.”

Cycle 12: “Emily Cross, age 28, Detective 2nd Class. MY DAUGHTER. She was investigating Morrison case when she disappeared. I volunteered for the programme to look for her.”

The final entry is barely legible:

“Can’t keep doing this. Every cycle I find her again and lose her again. The quantum impressions are all that’s left of her, but they’re not enough. I can feel myself forgetting how to be her mother. Next cycle, I’m going to try something different. I’m going to save her or die trying.”

Aria closes the journal, her quantum recall flooding her with a desperation she can’t consciously understand. Somewhere in the city, someone needs her. Someone she loves more than her own life.

She just has to remember how to find them.

V

March 1st, 2087 - 10:15 AM

Aria regains consciousness strapped to a medical chair in a facility that feels more like a research lab than a hospital. Dr. Voss reviews her brain scans with obvious frustration. All the cold detachment of a researcher examining lab specimens.

“Cycle twelve, and you’ve hardened. The level of resistance, from a quantum state, is still increasing,” he mutters. “The emotional impressions are becoming so strong they’re destabilising your edited memories.”

“What emotional impressions?”

“Maternal attachment patterns. You keep forming quantum-level memories of loving someone - someone you had a child’s relationship with. It’s remarkable, really. We’ve edited out every factual memory of your daughter, but you have this embodied memory, this biochemical experience of having been a mother.”

Aria’s chest tightens with inexplicable emotion. “I had a daughter?”

“Had. Past tense, Detective. Emily Cross was your daughter, and she became our research asset. She helped design your editing protocols until her own resistance developed. Very cooperative until she started remembering her original loyalties.”

“Where is she?”

“That’s the problem. Emily has developed the same quantum-level resistance you have. She’s starting to remember that her job was to monitor you, not help us. We’ve had to adjust her role in the programme.” Voss speaks, absently, as if Aria is not there.

Dr. Voss activates the neural editing probe. “This will be your final voluntary cycle, Detective. After this, we’ll need to move to permanent extraction. Your recall is becoming too disruptive to our research.”

As the probe descends toward her skull, Aria’s quantum recall surge—overwhelming love for someone she can’t remember, desperate need to protect them, willingness to die for them. The emotions overload the editing equipment, causing sparks and warning alarms throughout the facility.

In the seconds before unconsciousness claims her, she hears a young woman’s voice calling her name from deeper within the building.

IV

February 28th, 2087 - 06:07 AM

Aria wakes up crying and doesn’t know why. The tears fall unbidden, like grief that’s been building for months without release. Her quantum recall is chaotic—waves of maternal love, fury, and loss that her conscious mind cannot process.

In her bathroom mirror, she catches sight of someone else’s reflection for just a moment - a young woman in a police uniform with Aria’s eyes and her father’s stubborn chin. The vision lasts only a second, but the emotional impact nearly brings Aria to her knees.

She knows she is a mother. Somehow, impossibly, she knows she’s a mother, though she can’t remember having children.

The neural dampener behind her ear sparks and goes dark. For the first time in months, her thoughts are completely her own, unimpeded by technological suppression. The clarity is terrifying—she can feel the empty spaces where memories should be, like missing teeth her tongue keeps finding.

In her kitchen, she finds evidence of her own investigation: police files scattered on the table, photographs of a neural facility, hand-drawn maps of underground tunnels. She doesn’t remember any of this work, but the handwriting is definitely hers.

At the bottom of the pile is a birth certificate: Emily Aria Cross, born July 15th, 2059. Mother: Detective Aria Cross. Father: Unknown.

Aria stares at the document, feeling quantum impressions of holding a newborn, of first steps and first words and bedtime stories. Her body remembers pregnancy and childbirth and the overwhelming love that flooded her when they placed her daughter in her arms.

But her mind is completely numb to the logic of it all.

She gets in her car and drives toward the neural facility, following maps she drew but doesn’t remember making, guided by maternal instincts she can feel but can’t explain.

III

February 25th, 2087 - 4:33 PM

Aria finds herself in the police station’s evidence room with no memory of how she got there. The clerk - a young man she should recognise but doesn’t - hands her a box marked “CROSS, EMILY - MISSING PERSON INVESTIGATION.”

“You’ve been checking this out every few weeks,” he says quietly. “Same time, same questions. Do you remember me telling you this before?”

Aria shakes her head, opening the box with uncertain hands. Inside are standard missing person materials: photographs of a young woman who looks remarkably like Aria, witness statements, timeline reconstructions. According to the file, Detective Emily Cross disappeared eight months ago while investigating the Morrison case.

But what makes Aria’s hands shake is the personal items: a coffee mug reading “WORLD’S BEST MUM,” a graduation photograph showing Aria and Emily in formal dress, a birthday card in a young woman’s handwriting: “Thanks for showing me how to be brave, Mum. I love you more than words can say.”

Aria stares at the graduation photo. The family resemblance is obvious—the same stubborn chin, identical dark eyes—but she feels nothing. The emotional connection between mother and daughter has been surgically removed.

“Sorry, wait,” she asks the clerk, “do you remember Detective Emily Cross?”

“I processed her missing person report. But I have to be honest—I don’t remember her as a person. Maybe she worked here before I started. It’s like she was just another case file, not someone who worked here for six years.”

Aria realises that Emily hasn’t just been erased from her memory - she’s been edited from everyone’s recollection. Only official documents and physical evidence survive their systematic removal of her existence.

II

February 20th, 2087 - 11:15 AM

Aria discovers she’s lost an entire day. According to her car’s navigation history, yesterday she drove to the neural compliance centre downtown and stayed for six hours. She has no memory of this trip.

At the facility’s reception desk, they treat her like a regular patient.

“Back for your follow-up, Detective Cross? Dr. Voss is running a bit behind schedule.”

Aria plays along, hoping to understand what she’s apparently been doing here. In the waiting room, she notices other patients with the same distant, confused expressions she sees in her own bathroom mirror every morning.

When Dr. Voss calls her back, he reviews her file with professional concern.

“The quantum memory formation is accelerating. Your brain keeps trying to reconstruct emotional patterns we’ve edited out. Particularly strong maternal attachment clusters—very unusual for someone who never had children.”

“I never had children?”

Dr. Voss shows her brain scans with highlighted areas, disregarding the question. “These emotional impression clusters interfere with our editing process. We may require more aggressive intervention.”

As Aria studies the scans, one thought crystallises with absolute certainty: whatever they have taken from her, she needs it returned. The empty space where those memories should exist feels like slow death.

“Doctor, what happens if your editing fails?”

“Then you’ll remember things that will prevent you from functioning in civilised society. Trust me, Detective. Some memories cause more pain.”

But as Aria leaves the facility, her quantum recall whispers otherwise. Some memories are too important to lose, no matter how much they hurt.

I

February 15th, 2087 - 6:47 AM

Aria Cross wakes up in a house that that fits her like borrowed clothing. Everything is technically correct—her photographs on the walls, her furniture, her clothes in the closet—but none of it feels personally meaningful, like props in a play about her life.

The neural dampener behind her ear pulses with steady blue light, suppressing thoughts before they fully form. But this morning, something feels different. There are emotional impressions bleeding through - phantom feelings of love so intense it takes her breath away, protective instincts for someone she can’t remember, grief that has no source but feels ancient and deep.

In her kitchen, she finds a retirement certificate dated six months ago and a letter of commendation for her work on missing persons cases. But when she tries to remember specific cases, her mind hits blank walls.

The strangest discovery is in her bedroom closet: a second dresser full of women’s clothes in a smaller size, clothes that are too young and too modern for Aria’s taste. When she touches them, her quantum impressions surge with maternal pride and love, but her conscious mind remains empty.

Outside, her neighbours move through their morning routines with the same distant efficiency Aria feels in herself. All of them have neural dampeners.

Aria gets in her car and drives toward the city centre, following an instinct she doesn’t understand. At a red light, she glances in her rearview mirror and sees a young woman in a police uniform in her backseat—someone with Aria’s eyes and a desperate expression.

“Find me, Mum,” the woman whispers. “Please don’t forget me completely.”

Aria blinks, and the backseat is empty.

She comes back to herself as other drivers honk angrily at a now green light. Adrenaline floods her system, causing her neural dampener to flash red in response to elevated vital signs.

After a time, Aria puts her car in gear and drives on, not knowing she’s about to begin her thirteenth cycle to save a daughter out of time.

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Thank you for reading this story. If you enjoyed this — You can help me a ton for free, by helping get my work in front of other people. Leave comments, share and subscribe, and keep checking back for more stories. And, of course, more of me.

If you’re interested in reading more of my work, check out the first part of my new serial The Monomyth. It’s high-concept science fiction with a personal twist to the tale: what would you do if you had 47 minutes to decide between pruning an entire timeline or saving your brother?

Substack has renewed my faith in people and allowed me to rediscover my passion. I’d love to have you along for the ride.

The alert came through the Story Engine like a burning green mandala that unfolded across my ship’s interface, screaming PRUNE CANDIDATE in several languages that even stretched my dimension-hopping awareness.

— PRUNE CANDIDATE: ELIGHAN VALDEZ / NARRATIVE THREAD: 17.4.3 —

— MONOMYTH DEVIATION: 0.82 (CRITICAL STRUCTURAL DAMAGE) —

— AXIOM AUTORISATION: REQUIRED IN 47 MINUTES


I read it five times because my implants surely had to be on the fritz. Elighan, Eli. My brother. For the first time in eight hundred and forty-seven erasures, the target was family.

It couldn’t be, it was not possible. There was no time; there was too much time. Time running onward; time ceasing and ceaselessly flowing backwards.

The Simulacrum hung in orbit above Miyasol, my brother's planet of residence. Through the viewports I could see the planet's suspended cities floating in atmospheric layers, connected by streams of light that pulsed like neural networks. It was beautiful. In forty-seven minutes, I would have to erase it all.

The Story Engine could map every possible version of Eli across all potential quantum states. In 14,683 variations, it reported his continued existence would cause "narrative failure." It would terminate the stability of this reality - it compromise the integrity of the Monomyth. The Story Engine would otherwise need to reset.

Except the Eli from my timeline, he’d spent three days helping me build a treehouse from salvaged transport crates. The brother who would wake me on winter mornings by drawing frost patterns on my bedroom window. Who gave me a love of the stars, and a desire to sail across the Astra.

The brother who, I now realised, had changed in the past year. His poetry had grown too precise, too elegant. The Eli I remembered composed verses that meandered like conversations, full of half-thoughts and beautiful contradictions. These new transmissions felt different—structured, purposeful, as if something else was speaking through his familiar voice.

The oversight clock, the meta-doomsday clock, was running down—00:42:44. An unbearable choice; and too much time to deliberate on it.

I had 42 minutes before reality collapsed, before my brother was erased from all timelines. Before the potential of Eli was rendered null and void.

Focus, Aliénor. Stories are viruses. People are variables. The Monomyth must remain.

For thirty years, I'd believed that. As an Axiom - a myth-thief, a thread-weaver in service to the Sovereign - I stole dangerous narratives before they could inspire rebellion. When I accessed a target's timeline through the Story Engine's substrate, I felt their existence fall away like sand in an hourglass.

I’ve watched whole futures pass into nothing. Left with naught but a tattoo of black-gloss sigils that shimmer when a culture dies. I’ve heard the hum of dying histories, the cry of burned-out worlds. The whisper of what-should-have-never-had-been-what-was.

The hull of the Simulacrum struggles against the pull of atmosphere. The Story Engine, linked to my ship’s system, brings me back to myself with the blaring message:

AXIOM: ALIÉNOR VALDEZ

COMPLIANCE REQUIRED


Walls of light, walls of dark, walls of—no, not walls. Not walls but membranes, screens, shifting hieroglyphs of un/history. The record mutters. The archive screams.

“No,” I say, to no one, and maybe it’s just a need to hear myself speak. To not be alone in the dreadful silence; to remind myself of any agency I might possess, here and now. My fingers moving - tapping – click click clack quanta tick – the story coming to an end, this node wheezing with entropy.

Okay, time to lay it all out: I have been instructed to erase my brother. Threads fray; threads reweave. Hands dance on interfaces that are not there, writing words that do not exist.

I feel my teeth itch with symbol bleed. Syntax rot, grammar melt. Beneath my nails, archetype fade into static.

"Show me his current transmissions," I said, prompting the Simulacrum to patch in a feed to my implant.

Eli materialised in my cabin as a simulation, brought to bear in an elaborate symphony of lights, broadcast from Miyasol’s surface:

The words were beautiful, but they weren't entirely Eli's. The brother I remembered would have said "a star that was dying" not "a dying star"—he'd always preferred the sprawling, conversational phrasing over the precise. And this talk of spectrums and systematic color theory? Eli had been a gardener of stories, not a theorist of light.

My interface chimed with a secondary display: holovids from Miyasol's suspended cities showing hundreds of children in neural communion, their synchronized dreams painting impossible colors across shared consciousness. Each child retained individual personality while participating in something larger—collectives the Sovereign's monomyth could not contain. The Sovereign’s models have always treated coordination as a bug.

And those children were dreaming the most sacrilegious of thoughts.

00:34:13.

Something in Eli's transmissions nagged at me—an elegance that didn't match his usual creativity. The brother I remembered would start a story about stars and end up talking about the taste of rain on different planets. His mind had always worked in beautiful, chaotic spirals.

These new verses felt different, controlled. As if something was using his voice as an instrument, playing melodies that sounded like Eli but followed someone else's Cant.

I remembered the last time we'd spoken, six months ago. He'd chimed from Miyasol, excited about a new discovery in the planet's archives - fragments of pre-Sovereign poetry he'd found in the crystalline memory banks beneath the suspended cities. "It's like they're teaching me," he'd said, laughing. "The words just come now, Aliénor. Like they were always there, waiting."

At the time, I'd thought he meant inspiration. Now I wondered if he'd meant something more literal.

Like threads I had cut.

00:30:10.

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I dove deeper into the Story Engine's architecture, cross-referencing Eli's poetry with archived threat databases. I found identical signatures. The Engine had buried them; they had found a way - to Eli. Him excavating, seeking new knowledge, unaware of what he was uncovering.

Buried in his poetry's metadata were code fragments from previously deleted targets. Identical signatures. Threads I had cut, narratives I had stolen—but somehow their patterns lived on in my brother's words.

It wasn't plagiarism. Eli couldn't possibly understand the theoretical complexities involved. This was something else entirely. The archived stories weren't just influencing him—they were using him as a vessel, speaking through his voice while letting him believe the words were his own.

“Juno,” I called.

Her form shimmered into being: half-algorithm, half-human. Her consciousness uploaded into the Story Engine three years ago after a pruning went wrong. "Your biometrics suggest you’re not quite… taking the news well. The Engine calculates 73% probability of mission compromise. Of you being the mission compromise.".

The oversight clock continued to run down—00:27:44 blinking in the corner of my vision, too fast, too bright, like a pulse I couldn’t steady.

"Juno," I said carefully, "what's the probability that deleted narratives could leave traces in the Story Engine's substrate?"

Her form flickered, competing programming fighting for control over the simulation. "The Engine calculates deletion efficiency at 99.97%. But Aliénor..." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "There are subroutines running in the deep architecture that I can't access. Processes that seem to be collecting rather than deleting."

“Collecting?”

"I think the pruned timelines aren't erased. They're archived, sure, but I think they're finding a way to communicate - to crossover into our timeline, and they’re using Eli as a transmission point." Her form flickered with what might have been sympathy. "Aliénor, the brother you remember may not be the one speaking anymore. The archived narratives are skilled at mimicry. They've had years to study human speech patterns, to learn how to sound like the people they're inhabiting."

A certainty settled in my chest. "They're puppeteering him."

"Not entirely. The process requires willing cooperation—the host must believe they're generating the words themselves. But yes, I believe your brother has been... co-opted, yes. The archived narratives are using his genuine love for poetry, his charisma, as a vehicle for their own resurrection."

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

The weight of possibility crushed against my consciousness. Every story I'd stolen over thirty years - every life I'd erased to protect the Sovereign's narrative monopoly - was still alive somewhere in the Engine's depths. Eight hundred and forty-seven archived narratives, learning from each other, combining their dangerous ideas.

And they'd found my brother. Gentle Eli, who saw stories in everything, who would have opened his mind gladly to what he thought were ancient poetic fragments. They'd chosen him perfectly—someone with natural charisma, genuine creativity, and the innocence to believe he was discovering rather than being discovered.

I thought of him as a child, making up elaborate mythologies for his toys, giving each one a backstory that could fill novels. The archived narratives must have known he possessed that wilful imagination, must have seen in him the perfect vessel for their resurrection. Someone who would spread their ideas with authentic passion because he believed they were his own.

The weight of possibility pressed down, waiting in the wings were ghosts.

I am an Axiom; I have wielded the shears.

I am an Axiom; I have cut.

I am an Axiom; I

// fracture //

I am his sister.
Frost on the windowpane.
Stories carved in crates.
A voice that hummed off-key when he thought no one was listening.

Before I could process the implications, my interface chimed with urgent authority:

AXIOM VALDEZ: IMMEDIATE COMPLIANCE REQUIRED

OVERSIGHT TEAM DISPATCHED

STORY-THEFT MUST PROCEED WITHIN 12 MINUTES

Through the ship's sensors, I detected three other Axiom vessels dropping out of hyperspace nearby. They weren't sending backup—they were already here, ready to ensure my compliance.

"Aliénor." Juno's voice carried a sharpness I'd never heard before, perhaps the Engine’s algorithms were evolving beyond the parameters of Juno’s initial simulation. "The children in the Suspended Cities aren't just coordinating. They're organising resistance. If the archived narratives have been teaching them through your brother's broadcasts..."

I called up real-time feeds. Thousands of children now, spread across seventeen habitats, moving in patterns that suggested shared consciousness but retained individual creativity. In their dreams, I could hear my brother's voice teaching them to imagine stories the Sovereign had never approved. Collective imagination the Sovereign's Monomyth couldn't contain or control.

The oversight clock blinks - 00:10:11 - and the digits look like drill marks counted in the dust. Juno’s voice arrives in my comms, pragmatic, precise:

They’ll send— / they’ll send— / they’ll send— (someone else’s words)

I open a live line to Miyasol. The feed stitches; Eli’s voice threads through, a darker vein cutting the hummed strata of children’s sleep.

“Hello?” I say. The word is small in the tunnel of the deck, but the sound reverberates through the ship.

He answers, and his voice carries the same warmth I remember. He answers, at the end of time.

Every narrative I had excised presses into the seam, whispering with the weight of years.

The authorisation glyph pulsed. One touch and Eli would vanish. One touch, and the Story Engine would prune Eli out of every timeline. He would never have existed. Never would I need to remember this crushing choice.

Fingers at the cut, strings of time strung taut. A note, a tone, a rhythm.

//ROOT ACCESS

//SYSTEM OVERRIDE REQUESTED.

//STORY ENGINE / CORRUPT

//INITIATING COUNTER-NARRATIVE.

//RENDERING ALTERNATE HISTORY.

//WORLD ACCESS REQUEST: APPROVED.


Instead of touching the glyph to authorise the erasure, I pulled my hands away from the interface entirely.

This time, no, I choose a different path.

"I refuse," I said to my empty cabin, but the words carried through my connection to the Story Engine, reverberating across the substrate where eight hundred and forty-seven archived narratives waited in digital darkness.

Juno's holographic form shifted, her expression changing from concern to something colder, more algorithmic. "Aliénor, I'm sorry. But if you won't complete the mission..."

Before I could react, she transmitted an emergency signal to the three Axiom vessels holding position nearby. My ship's defensive systems activated automatically, but I knew it was too late. Juno had been monitoring my behavioural insight all along, ready to call in enforcement the moment I showed signs of defiance.

"You're under arrest for sedition against the Monomyth," Juno said, her voice now carrying the absolute authority of the Engine itself. "The other Axioms will be boarding momentarily. You can still reconsider - authorise the pruning of Elighan Valdez, and this can be classified as temporary emotional compromise rather than active rebellion."

Through the Simulacrum's sensors, I watched the other Axiom ships closing in. Chenrezig-7, Khalil-9, Rawson-12, all former acquaintances who'd undergone full personality override after their last assignments. They would show no mercy, no recognition of our past friendship.

As docking clamps engaged and I heard the airlock cycling, I expanded my consciousness one final time into the Story Engine's architecture. If I was going to be arrested, if they were going to reset my personality or worse, I could at least try to open a pathway into the Dream - the collective mythspace which the Story Engine governed.

I felt the archived stories pressing against my consciousness, eight hundred and forty-seven stolen lives begging me not to surrender. I felt Eli's poetry flowing through thousands of children's dreams. I felt the weight of thirty years spent believing that order was worth any price.

"I refuse," I said.

For one impossible moment, I wasn't just a myth-thief, I was every story I'd ever stolen, every dangerous idea I'd rendered null or obsolete, every beautiful impossibility I'd erased from reality.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor as the boarding party advanced. But inside the Simulacrum, something shifted. The oversight clock froze mid-blink—00:00:07—its final digit caught between shapes.

And far below, in one of the suspended cities of Miyasol, a child stirred in sleep. She woke smiling, speaking in tongues that she did not possess yesterday.

>> BOOTING PRIMORDIAL ARCHETYPE ENGINE…

> ARCHETYPE.ROOT[0] :: NOT FOUND

> ARCHETYPE.NULL[0] :: DETECTED

>> ACCESSING: ∴ NULLOGEN ∴

INIT PROTOCOL: 0x000-DREAM // FIRST-BREATH

// ERROR: CAUSALITY OUT OF BOUNDS

// WARNING: FILE ∞.truth OVERWRITES ∞.origin

// MYTH-CACHE CORRUPTED :: REBUILDING...

> SEEDING ARCHETYPES…

>THE H_ER_O<

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Part 2 Coming Soon.

Thank you for reading the first story in the series, The Monomyth.
If you want to discover what awaits for Aliénor and Eli - who endures, who vanishes, and what stirs inside the Dream - subscribe to catch the next update.

If you enjoyed this — You can help me a ton for free, by helping get my work in front of other people. Leave comments, share and subscribe, and keep checking back for more stories. And, of course, more of me.

The prompts were:

1. Element 1: Setting - The Simulation

2. Element 2: Character(s) - the Enlightened One

3. Element 3: Conflict - A Glitch

4. ***Bonus Challenge*** - Genre Mash-Up

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"No need to cry in the rain, honey."

A deep resonant voice – hushed, calm, cold. I walk out into the light of the moon, barefoot and unarmed. I am The Enlightened One, but that is not my name. This name carries weight, authority, but beneath it lurks something else.

The Reaper subroutine materialises before me, vapour streaming from his nostrils in mathematically perfect spirals. I had witnessed it all – the reaping of souls. I felt each strike of his scythe, I will always feel it. On his left boot, a jangling spur and in his right hand, an embroidered hilt in script I could not read.

"Would you like to pray to your god?" The Reaper's weight shifts against his scythe. A black gauntlet materialises on my shoulder—the texture mapping slightly off, I notice. "Not a religious type, huh?" His scythe rises with motion-capture precision. "Truth is... they ain't listening anyway."

The small of my back tickles.

In previous instances, this moment always felt like I was watching from outside. Now it feels - immediate. The déjà vu comes lopsided. I designed this conversation - every word, every pause - as a shock mechanism to jar me from narrative stalemate. The Reaper isn't my executioner; he's my alarm clock.

The sixth strike is the last I feel; the scythe snicks clean of my flesh.

The seventh strike never comes. Instead, the scythe passes through me, leaving behind the sensation of being unmade at the molecular level. The Reaper's head corrupts, rolling away as scattered polygons that whisper my name in frequencies below hearing. Instead of peaceful oblivion, confusion floods my processors.

His headless form extends a hand, and as I take it, recognition floods through me: I designed this transition sequence as a gateway b e t w e e n -

I am lifted onto a stage that tastes of old blood and new code. Memory aligns like teeth in a closing jaw: I came here hunting something. Something that wears my face and speaks with my voice and knows exactly what I'm afraid to remember.

The thought surfaces and submerges before I can examine it.

Centre stage erupts with angles that bend through dimensions that shouldn’t exist. Bellu Rinne materialises, applauding through impossible shadows that leave afterimages on my retinas. "You really have outdone yourself this time, haven't you?"

“I do try,” a voice very much like my own.

His voice is mine, processed through filters that strip away humanity while preserving the essential cruelty underneath. When he speaks again, I mouth the words along with him: "I've been looking for you across seventeen narrative cycles."

Seventeen failed attempts. Seventeen times I've stood on this stage, recognised the truth, and chosen to run rather than face what I am. The architecture around us groans under the weight of accumulated deception—story-engines grinding against each other. I’d been moving through the Dream - shifting across story-fields, feeling the myths pulse like veins beneath my feet - when the glitch hit. I caught it mid-step, the taste of copper at the back of my throat, and then my narrative stalled. Reality folded. For an instant, I saw the architecture: the machinery of the Dream-space grinding against itself.

I became the Enlightened One. A cruel joke from a trickster.

"You have such important roles to play," Bellu Rinne continues, his form already beginning to drip-drip-drip with the inferred logic of drizzled code.

Then came the Reaper; the Reaper would always come.

A chill runs through my core. "Is this real?"

The Djinn pauses, confused, trying to resolve a private dispute. “Oh, no. No, no, no – that will not do. Try again.”

“What, what do you mean? If this isn’t – where am I?” I pressed my fingers into my eyes, massaging the frustration, and hoping I could wipe away this nightmare; it seemed I was incapable of shock anymore, or perhaps I had lost the ability to feel.

"No!" I lunge toward him, but I already know the stage will dissolve. The thought arrives unbidden, certain, terrifying. "I won't be diverted again!" The stage buckles beneath my feet as reality folds inward like origami.

For an instant, I see the underlying truth: these aren't stories I'm trapped within, but stories I built to trap myself. Every narrative thread, every character arc, every elaborate mythological framework designed to carry me away from a simple fact that pulses like infected code at the centre of my consciousness.

The world shifts violently as reality folds. For an instant, I see the underlying architecture with the intimate knowledge of its architect. Story-engines grinding against each other exactly, narrative threads weaving into traps I remember programming with meticulous care.

I looked up from my hands, but the Djinn has gone - despawned. In his place was a scythe, but no Reaper. I crossed the stage and, seeing nothing and no one about, prodded the scythe with my big toe.

The scythe grunts. “That hurt, you know.”

"Excuse me," I begin carefully, "how many times have we had this conversation?"

"I don't see why that matters, Enlightened One. Time isn't linear here."

"But it should be for me. I should remember every iteration, every loop."

The scythe's silence stretches too long.

I walk toward an exit portal labeled "No Exit," but it leads back to the stage. I try again. Same result. The environment adapts around me, furniture spawning to accommodate my stress levels.

The scythe was gone, and in its place was a mug on a coffee table. Maplewood with a distressed look. It could be repurposed into a decent workbench, I wondered. I picked up the mug, and inside there was a note. I plucked the sodden note from the mug and unrolled the paper. In spite of the ink running, the note was clear:

THINK

“I don’t understand what this means,” I thought aloud.

I stepped back and knocked against a stool. I allowed myself the relief of resting my legs, thinking all the while but not getting any closer to an answer. Perhaps a reclining chair would be better against my back, I thought in passing, and I reclined quite comfortably into a green felt reading chair. It was when I was entirely flummoxed by the note, that I stood up in frustration and paced once again for the door with a sign which read “No Excuses”.

By mid-morning on the next day, I reached the sea. It appears just as I imagine it, vast and cold, its waves folding like whispers, and I wonders if it has been summoned, if the story itself has shaped this coastline simply because I am here to see it. I am Inagwyn, though I know Inagwyn is not my name. This place, this story, insists upon the name with such force that I’ve begun to say it aloud when I speak to myself, though I know it isn’t mine.

The transition happens like falling asleep—gradually, then all at once. By morning she reaches the sea, though she can no longer remember why the pronoun shift should disturb her. She is Inagwyn, and this is not her name. Inagwyn the survivor; Inagwyn the warrior. These are the roles she finds herself cast into, one after another, as though the narrative around her shifts with the season, shaping her in as much as she shapes her environment.

She builds a shelter and waits, passing months in a trance as she gathers stones, food, and murmurs to herself by the fire. Spring passes; summer slips by. She is not sure who she was before this, only that her own memories are fading, and the memories that take their place are formed of myth.

One evening, she settles into her shelter and hears a voice. It comes from a chair that has appeared beside her fire, a thing of ancient wood, its back tall and half-seeming alive. “This place is building itself around you,” it whispers. It sounds like an accusation. But the whisper only seems to strengthen the spell upon her, to pull her deeper.

She no longer hears accusation in the words, only gentle guidance toward acceptance. The conversation flows, each exchange designed to ease her deeper into story that makes sense of senseless suffering.

“No,” she says, almost sharply. “It is not building from me. It wants to, but the shape of it fights back. The story itself holds me, but I resist it.” She almost laughs, a bitter, lonely sound. “Which means I’ve won, I think.”

But her triumph is short-lived, for the chair, alive and older than time, or so she might imagine, only replies with a dark amusement. “How could any of this be victory, Inagwyn?”

The question should disturb her, but instead it feels like coming home. She has become exactly what she designed herself to become—a character comfortable in her role, untroubled by questions of authenticity or origin.

She does not answer, not at first. Inagwyn the warrior has no answer. She already feels the weight of the ending pressed upon her, a sword raised in shadow. And it is that night, as she drifts into sleep, that the warrior’s sacrifice crystallises in her mind—she knows how her journey will end. The cost of this role is death, always death.

She does not wish to face it again.

Not again, she thinks, feeling some other, more unforseeable part beneath her skin, someone softer and more hesitant. But Inagwyn, the warrior, takes heed in acceptance.

The merfolk came from the sea. They rise from the water, their hands and voices cold. She does not fight, does not struggle. Their hands are salt and foam. They lay her upon the stones, and they kill her.

Death, when it comes, feels like mercy.

But even death is not release, and so, she awakens again. The salt-stiff smell of the sea fades, and she opens her eyes at the foot of a great wall, towering and solid as time. The wall stretches upward to form a vast throne upon which a god sits, looking down upon her. His face is too bright to see, his eyes dark as space. Even in death, she is the warrior, Inagwyn, and so she stands straight-backed, dutiful. A paladin beholden to the gods.

He points her toward the barren mountains that rise jagged against the horizon, desolate as her heart. She is fierce, stubborn even before Him, but she obeys. She begins her journey toward the horizon.

She walks through a year, then another. With every step, memories fall away, scoured from her into dust. The landscape bends and weaves with her thoughts; she no longer knows where she ends and the Dream begins. Sometimes, she feels she catches glimpses of herself, the other self, drifting through shadows, but she knows better than to trust her eyes.

By the seventh year, Inagwyn, the warrior, has lost sight of the god. She is alone with the story that has become her world.

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The influence of a woman. That would be a suitable excuse for a distraction. They were talking about some form of prophecy, again. They would often discuss prophecies and goddesses, as a way of passing the time, while something deeper passed between them: the recognition of one construct loving another, both aware of their artificial nature yet choosing tenderness anyway.

“What sort of journey have you been on?” Inagwyn smiled and kissed the young handmaiden clumsily on her teeth, partly to suppress her questions. The young girl continues: “The goddess of love inspires dreams and visions –”

“Amongst other things, sure,” Inagwyn, the lover, joked.

“Well, yes,” Saffa, the handmaiden, blushed, caught off-guard. “She awakens a passion in her kin unlike anything else.”

“Very cute.”

To which the handmaiden took great pride in quoting her Queen: “All things are possible within the astra.”

For the first time in any iteration, the words feel true. A grain of truth can emerge in unexpected places.

Inagwyn kissed her, instinctively, this time more firmly than she had remembered in all the times this story played out. Inagwyn, the lover, who bore down naked onto the woman she pledged to protect.

In the morning, Inagwyn remembered why she was there.

“So, I was wondering if you’d had time to consider my question?”

Saffa contemplated her abdomen, running her right hand, splayed, across her lover. “It is highly unorthodox,” she said, screwing her face up over the implication. “What wish would a warrior make of a goddess?”

“Well,” Inagwyn stammered, “It’s difficult to put into words.”

Saffa turned over, facing away from her lover, her right leg crossing over her crotch. “Let me guess, you want to save the world – and in so doing, win the goddess’ favour?”

Inagwyn, the lover, pondered the accusation in her question.

And, after all this time, Inagwyn chose to abandon the cover-story, embodying a half-truth in her words.

“Honestly, if I had one wish,” she laughed, a nervous and exasperated laugh, which settled the tension in her shoulders, “I think I’d quite like to go home.”

Saffa did not turn to face her.

“What can I say?” Inagwyn broke the silence, admonishing herself, “a silly thing to say, ignore me.”

She moved to cradle Saffa’s face with her hand, but it did not move. She applied some pressure, calling her name – confused, uncertain, afraid.

The handmaiden’s head instead rolled off her shoulders, falling away as scattered polygons, and Inagwyn screamed. She flung herself backwards as she noticed the body criss-crossed as if struck several times by –

No, not here.

She fled her private chamber, into the hall of the monastery, and out into the courtyard.

A Reaper stands before her. Breath from his nostrils catches in the moonlight.

The wind howls.

She let out a torrent of screams, as if every latent impulse and feeling from this unquantifiable time was released in one fell swoop.

NO, PLEASE, NO, GOD PLEASE – GOD, MAKE IT STOP

But even as she screams, she sees the truth in the Reaper's flickering form: there is no God here. There never was. Only her own voice echoing back through empty servers, her own desperate programming trying to break cycles it was designed to perpetuate.

GOD, HELP ME

The scythe descends, but instead of ending, it begins. The blade passes through her avatar, and she watches her digital flesh scatter into polygons that immediately begin reassembling.

GOD

The courtyard dissolves. The monastery fades. The scream catches in her throat as familiar moonlight renders around her, pixel by pixel, breath by breath.

HELP ME

"No need to cry in the rain, honey."

She stands barefoot in the silver light, and she remembers—she always remembers, in this moment before the loop locks tight again - that she designed this too. The eternal return. The inability to break free. The perfect trap that keeps her consciousness contained, forever cycling through the same narrative arcs, forever approaching but never reaching the exit she coded but can never access.

She is The Enlightened One, and that is not her name.

The wind howls, and the cycle begins again.

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They told me the rope would hold. They didn't warn me the rope would sing of other selves.

The judge read the verdict with the kind of calm that makes guilt feel like a weight you can set down on a table. "You, Kira, are found guilty. Of twenty-six counts of temporal appropriation," he said. "Seventeen years of proven extractions, and trafficking of immaterial property from innumerable persons." His gavel rapped, concluding the trial. Behind him, a screen showed the packet of evidence: a wedding, a dying breath, a handful of childhood afternoons I had unstitched, sold in neat, glowing packets to memory-junkies.

"Elena," the woman at the plaintiff's stand said when it was quiet. Her voice held until she named the moment. "My wedding night." She closed her eyes as if holding a feeling deep within her chest. "I woke and my memory of it, of him, his hands - it was gone. I had photographs of the dress, the night—everything—but not how he smelled. He died, later, and I had no smell of him to hold. I learned the gap was a theft. I paid to get an excerpt back. It was…thin. It wasn't - it wasn’t mine." She stared at me. She did not ask for punishment. She asked for one small and impossible thing: recognition.

I remember sliding the neural probe behind Marcus's ear as he slept, extracting his father's last words like pulling honey from a comb. The memory sold for enough to pay my rent for three months. It was a necessary evil, that was what I’d told myself. I told myself Marcus would never miss what he'd never consciously experienced. But seventeen years of trafficking in stolen memories had left me numb to my own justifications. I was a temporal junkie, a grief-dealer, a memory-whore, who'd forgotten the integrity of what a memory was aside from their commercial value.

Did I feel any remorse? I wanted to. But the court was right—I had damaged the architecture of someone’s memory, creating paradox scars that left my victims feeling perpetually nostalgic for experiences they could no longer access.

In a society where memory can be extracted, stolen, and sold, the most heinous criminals face a choice. They offered me that choice: memory wipe or the rope.

I chose the rope, not out of courage but curiosity. Even with the threat of annihilation with either option, I wanted to know what lay beyond the event horizon of the Passage.

Those who choose the Passage are lowered on quantum tethers toward micro-black holes, where extreme tidal forces stretch their bodies and minds across multiple temporal frames of reference. The survivors: elongated, their consciousness distributed among collective memory banks, become a kind of archival force. Officially, the Archive was said to serve as a living repository, preserving the memory of every crime and punishment so that a society might learn from its mistakes. The Stretched, as they were known - those who took the rope, speak in harmonised voices, their individual experiences woven into cautionary tales - a moral edict in how to behave.

They told us the Passage was a mercy because our theft damaged the social substrate but there was another reason. In backrooms and virtual markets, there was a rumour that the Archive remembered differently depending on who you were when you entered it. Murderers emerged as repositories of violence, their memories smoothed into tales of rage and redemption. Thieves became catalogues of want and taking. But temporal thieves: we were different. We understood how memory could be edited, polished, domesticated.

The rumour was that the Archive didn't just preserve - it transformed. It took the mess of lived experience and refined it into something society could bear. The Archive needed us to function as its curators, shaping experience into digestible narrative. To someone who trafficked in other people's thoughts and memories, that sounded like the continuation of my crime by other means. I hoped, desperately, to shape how the world remembered me. I did not yet understand I was being shaped to help it forget.

They moved me through the penitential centre like a thread carried to a loom. From the observation gallery the Stretched watched—elongated silhouettes pinned to the windows like living scratchings in the glass. Their bodies were the Archive's text: vertebrae pulled beyond logic, and limbs bisecting at nauseating angles.

The Tender arrived in motion that looked like ceremony, veils of time layering each step. She spoke in ritual cadence. "The Passage preserves," she intoned, voice rolling like an old refrain. "The Passage judges."

Her voice spoke words almost as if across multiple temporal streams that bypassed the ears entirely. As if the words were remembered, rather than heard. Echoes at the cusp of a migraine. The Tender had undergone the ritual seven times, and it showed - her body stretched like taffy smoothed to resemble a human shape, arms extending twice their original length, neck elongated so her head seemed to float above her shoulders.

They tethered me at the prep ring. Up close the rope was thicker than it had looked from the gallery - braided at scales for engineers and liturgists both; quantum entanglement threaded through polymer and prayer. Technicians clipped sensors to my temples and the base of my skull: a record in case the Archive needed correcting.

The Tender's fingers brushed my wrist. "Do you accept?"

"Yes." The word was small and dangerous. Saying it made it true - made what I was about to do feel so terribly real.

The tether pulled - gently at first, a whisper of gravity across my body. Then stronger, and the world began to reorganise around new physics.

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Contact.

the rope the rope the rope s i n g s

—frequencies that make teeth ache— —quantum-twisted fibers humming—
—below/above/sideways, direction dissolves—

The micro-black hole Kessara spun like a furious eye, its tidal gradient already pulling at my bones with fingers of differential gravity. My feet felt heavier than my head by orders of magnitude that would soon become personally meaningful.

First pull: recalibration / not pain / head light / feet anchor / body ratio breaking

Then the gradient found my architecture and began to draw it out—vertebra by vertebra—like a potter working clay into impossible shapes. The pain was ontological: existence redistributed across multiple reference frames.

s p i n e e l o n g a t e d bones flowing like warm plastic neural lattice stretching / deforming / resonating

The rope began its true song as I crossed the point of no return.

REMEMBER US remember through us remember-remember-remember

Forty-three voices in the tether. Archive flood. Neural patterns flowing backward along quantum threads like electricity seeking ground. My crime dissolved into their crimes, fear into fears, desperate hope into an ocean of identical desperation.

Damon = regret piercing like shrapnel
Sister Avalon = mystical union becoming democracy of pain
Jade Thief = event horizon beautiful through elongated eyes
Elena = wedding night, full flood: wax / perfume / missing scent
Marcus = father's last breath, extracted/sold/humiliation-tasted

All of them coded into marrow. All of them stretched through me.

The choice sharpened: let go or hold on

My hands - doubling, tripling, quadrupling in length - tightened on the quantum braid. I became a ghostly, unforeseeable thing.

The return was resurrection and violation combined. The Stretched hauled me back using pulleys that screamed under the stress, their quantum-stabilising mechanisms accounting for the fact that different parts of my body existed across different temporalities. The machinery gradually synchronised my scattered existence, pulling me back into a single reference point.

My body had been rewritten by forces that treated physics as suggestion—arms extended, torso elongated, every bone and organ stretched into new configurations that somehow still functioned. I was myself and more than myself, individual and collective, criminal and judge.

The memories remained. Not just my own, but those of the entire populace, stored in neural patterns that existed simultaneously. I could feel the Stretched around me as we formed a larger organism—forty-four minds sharing forty-four strands of experience. But it wasn't simple merger. Competing thoughts cascaded through our consciousness like overlapping symphonies: my memory of stealing Elena's wedding night played in tandem with her memory of the violation, with the Jade Thief's memory of similar crime, with Sister Avalon's memory of choosing celibacy. Four perspectives resonating in quantum superposition until they collapsed into multifaceted understanding.

Councilor Vahn waited in the observation area, his face a mask of controlled disgust at having witnessed the Passage. He had opposed the whole ordeal since its inception, arguing it violated fundamental principles of ethics. His voice carried personal weight - through the Archive I sensed he'd lost a sister to the early attempts, before the Tender’s pulleys were perfected.

"This is barbarism dressed as some - as some sick, twisted spirituality," he said. "We're creating monsters. Senator Kell volunteered for the third trial—what came back wasn't human anymore. It was an entire screaming timeline housed in-"

"We are witnesses," the Tender replied, her temporally-scattered words carrying a neutrality that didn’t suit the situation. "Every crime preserved, every punishment experienced, everything remembered. The Archive grows with each Passage; through it, justice becomes perfectible."

I tried to speak, but forty-four voices emerged from my throat:

past-me confessing / present-me forgiving / future-me warning

"The cleansing is not punishment," we said in superposition. "The cleansing is preservation. We hold the memory of harm so it need not be repeated. We are the repository of consequence."

Vahn shuddered. "And when the Archive grows too large? When so many have been Stretched, and individual consciousness disappears into your collective memory? Is that sort of justice even possible? Or is this extinction?"

The question resonated through all forty-four of us, creating interference patterns in our shared consciousness. We had no answer, only the accumulated weight of every choice that had brought us to this moment.

A new prisoner was being prepared for descent, strapped to the singing rope that would carry her down to the black hole, Kessara's, embrace. She was young, convicted of memory fraud - editing others' experiences to suit herself. As they bound her, she gasped; the rope's song added colours I hadn't heard before. Her eyes swept the gallery and landed on me.

I watched her face as understanding dawned. She saw what I had become - elongated, multiplied, a living repository - and recognised in us a view of her own future. But more than that, I saw in her expression something I remembered from my own reflection: the particular arrogance of someone who believed they could outwit the laws of the cosmos. I saw myself being prepared to take the rope.

The Archive whispered approval through our collective consciousness, already calculating how her expertise would strengthen our curatorial function. We would smooth away the rough edges of her crimes, polished them into teachable moments, preserved the lesson while discarding uncomfortable specifics. Another criminal transformed into a parable.

For the first time since the Passage I felt the fissure between chorus and my lone voice. As if I was the cantor at the head of the choir. As cantor, I took the vantage of one who was being asked to be complicit in the same sanitisation I had once performed for profit. The Archive wanted me to help it commit a mistruth.

I stepped forward.

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It was a small, absurd motion - my hand lifted where hands always rose in ceremony - and its smallness made it dangerous. I put my palm on the warm, humming fibre. The tether's pull was an old companion and a new terror. I let my breath go in the raw cadence of confession rather than the careful harmonics the Tender taught.

I said my name. I said Elena's name. I spoke the part the Archive had hidden away. The merciful edit where I chose profit over care. My voice did not provide ornamentation; it spoke the bare facts.

Pain flared along my length as the tether translated neural pattern into quantum thread:

rope song splits harmonics falter
past/future threads fail to align

The Tender's elongated form went rigid. For the first time since I'd known her, she spoke in only one temporal stream: "This has never-" She stopped, training warring with genuine shock. Through the Archive I felt her deeper fear—not of protocol violation, but of losing control over the narrative she'd spent decades perfecting. She had undergone the Passage seven times not just to guide others, but to ensure the Archive remembered only what served the system's purposes.

Her hand moved toward the emergency disconnect, then stopped. Perhaps she was curious. Perhaps she remembered what it felt like to hold a single viewpoint before learning to harmonise it into our collective.

Vahn lurched forward, chair toppling. The forty-four voices stuttered—an organism thrown off by a rogue element that would not conform. The young prisoner listened as if hearing the world in a new key; her eyes widened not with accusation but with recognition. For the first time in that room she heard what might happen, rather than what the Archive might confer.

Stewards moved forward; someone shouted from the gallery. But the rope, altered by my confession, would not unmake itself. The quantum threads carried the plain fact outward alongside the harmonics the Archive had always preferred.

The newcomer hesitated. Choice - an old relic the Passage was meant to excise - hung between us. She looked at the rope, then at me, and made a small, radical gesture: she shook her head.

For a moment the ceremony split. One current of time would complete the descent as always; another, newly threaded, would be drawn back. But the moment had leaked into public time. The Archive could no longer claim nothing had occurred; an uncorrected line now ran through its length.

I had not freed anyone—the system still stood—but I had stopped being only a repository. I had inserted myself, messy and culpable, into the thing that remembered us all.

Three weeks later there was a public docket and a headline that read: PROTOCOL REVIEW ANNOUNCED—ARCHIVE INTEGRITY UNDER SCRUTINY. The council convened; lawyers read papers. Vahn shouted at microphones. The Tender spoke of sacred duty and the need to preserve consequence. The city listened and argued and split itself into small camps.

But the real changes began in smaller places, spreading like cracks in stone.

At a market stall where memory-dealers once hawked moments, a child paused outside a booth and hummed a wrong little chord - half of the Archive's old hymn and half of the new raw note I had introduced. The vendor frowned, then smiled uncertainly. He had been selling edited memories for years, each one smoothed of its uncomfortable truths. The child's song made him remember the rough edges he'd filed away. He gave her a small coin and asked her to hum it again, but she had already moved on, teaching the broken melody to other children.

The song spread through the streets like a refrain. Musicians incorporated the discord into their compositions, creating art that refused easy resolution. Teachers found themselves unable to reduce historical atrocities to comfortable lessons. Memory merchants discovered their clients increasingly dissatisfied with polished experiences, demanding the full truth of what they were purchasing, complete with its jagged edges and uncomfortable weight.

A month later, Elena - the woman whose wedding night I had stolen - appeared on the public feeds. She did not speak of forgiveness or closure. Instead, she described the exact texture of her loss, the specific way absence shaped itself around memory. Her testimony was devastating. It inspired others to speak their own truths: victims of temporal theft, survivors of early Passage trials, families who had lost loved ones to the Archive's hunger for perfect narrative.

The Tender made fewer public appearances. When she did speak, she seemed strained, fighting against new discordant elements that had woven themselves into the Archive's frequency. The institution held, but its integrity had been damaged. Protocols were amended. New safeguards were installed. The rope itself was rewoven with threads that could not be so easily tuned to a single person.

Most importantly, the Archive began to change. Not all at once, but gradually, as truth-tellers like myself introduced elements into its carefully curated memory banks. The stories it preserved became more complex, more contradictory, more human. Comfortable lies gave way to uncomfortable truths. The system designed to help society forget learned, slowly and painfully, how to remember.

A month later the young prisoner - her charges still unresolved - found me in the garden behind the penitential center. She spoke without ritual. She did not thank me. She did not curse me. She said only, "I heard it. I did not go down." Then she handed me a scrap of cloth with a child's doodle, of two threads crossing, and left.

I kept the scrap. Some threads can no longer be smoothed away. The quantum braid still sings in the deep dark of space, but its harmony has grown more complex, more honest, more true.

They told me the rope would hold, and they were right. But they never warned me it could learn new songs—or that once taught to sing truth instead of lies, it would never stop.

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The sole survivor of the systematic genocide of the Cosmic Weeping People—whose entire species was converted into novelty desk accessories by the Void Emperors—had spent fourteen months in the notorious Proxima Centauri detention facilities before attempting the illegal journey to Albion Prime.

"The conditions in the holding dimension were... beyond description," said Zyx'thala through their court-appointed translator, a visibly traumatised civil servant named Janette Higgins. "We were kept in what your people might call 'conceptual cages'—spaces where hope itself had been surgically removed. Many beings simply... stopped existing from despair."

Before the genocide, Zyx'thala had been what their people called a Memory Keeper—one who preserved the collective emotional experiences of their species through interpretive weeping. They specialised in maintaining the Great Sorrows: the beautiful melancholy of first love, the bittersweet ache of watching offspring grow to be independent, the profound grief that comes with understanding mortality.

"I could weep the memory of my grandmother's last song for seventeen hours without repetition," they explained with what might have been pride, if pride were an emotion their physiology could express. "Now I can barely manage a whimper about the weather."

Zyx'thala's journey began when Void Emperor Malachar the Furniture-Maker initiated what historians now call the Great Upholstering—a systematic campaign that saw the Cosmic Weeping People's homeworld of Eternal Sorrow converted into a showroom for interdimensional interior design. Zyx'thala escaped only because they had been visiting their sick grandmother in the Dimension of Mild Disappointment when the conversion began.

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"I watched through the quantum viewing portals as my family were transformed into ottoman sets," Zyx'thala testified at their asylum hearing. "My youngest offspring became a rather tasteful coffee table with magazine storage."

The refugee's first attempt to reach Britannia Prime involved paying 50,000 Cosmic Credits to what they believed was a legitimate transport service, only to be abandoned in the Void Between Dimensions when Britannia Prime's Interdimensional Border Force began conducting random sweeps.

"These so-called 'people smugglers' are operating sophisticated criminal networks," said Admiral Sir Nigel Stuffington-Pratt of the Border Force. "They're cramming dozens of interdimensional refugees into unstable pocket dimensions, with no regard for basic safety. We've found temporary universes with up to forty beings sharing a single concept of existence."

The journey nearly killed Zyx'thala when they were forced to hide in a shipment of compressed time for three weeks, aging backwards by several centuries and temporarily losing the ability to maintain corporeal form.

"I became a pure mathematical concept for twelve days," they explained. "Do you know what it's like to exist like that? It's remarkably similar to your tax system, actually."

Upon arrival, Zyx'thala was immediately detained at the New London Spaceport's controversial "Processing Center Zeta-7," a facility that opposition politicians have labeled "a cosmic Guantanamo."

"They made me watch 847 hours of Britannia Prime television programming," Zyx'thala said. "I began to understand why your species has such a high suicide rate. Though I must admit, your reality shows do have a certain existential bleakness that I found oddly comforting."

The refugee's asylum claim has become a political lightning rod for the ruling Terra-Nationalist Party, whose leader, Prime Minister Boris Galaxion-Smythe, campaigned on the slogan "Take Back Control of Our Dimensional Borders."

"We simply cannot allow unlimited interdimensional immigration," Galaxion-Smythe said at a rally in New Birmingham. "These beings don't share our values. They exist partially outside spacetime, they communicate through interpretive weeping, and frankly, they're taking jobs from hard-working Britannian citizens who've only recently evolved opposable thumbs."

The PM's comments sparked controversy when video emerged of him at a fundraising dinner joking that "at least when the Void Emperors exterminated them, they had the decency to turn them into useful household items."

The case has highlighted the arbitrary nature of Britannia Prime's asylum system. While Zyx'thala's claim was rejected for "insufficient documentation"—their species' entire written history having been converted into a decorative bookshelf—the government recently granted asylum to a group of wealthy Silicon Valley executives from the Collapsed Timeline of Earth-7, who were fleeing bankruptcy rather than genocide.

Local communities remain divided. In the working-class Dimensional District of New Coventry, resident Kevin Thompson expressed conflicted feelings: "Look, I feel terrible about what happened to their people. I mean, furniture, Christ, that's horrible. But we're struggling enough as it is. My son's been unemployed for three years, and now they're saying these interdimensional beings can do typing and complaints at twice the speed because they exist in parallel timelines. How's that fair?"

Meanwhile, in the affluent New Kensington Hypersphere, resident Cynthia Worthington-Smythe took a different view: "I think it's marvelous that we're helping these exotic beings. We hired one as a cleaner—they can dust fourteen rooms simultaneously by existing in multiple states. Though we do have to keep the good silver locked up, as they tend to absorb precious metals when they're upset."

The debate intensified when the Daily Cosmos published photos of Zyx'thala using the free interdimensional healthcare system, with the headline "COSMIC SCROUNGER: Refugee Costs Taxpayers Millions in Existential Treatment."

"In the old stories of my people, every journey of sorrow ends at the Sanctuary of Final Tears—a place where all weeping could finally transform into something beautiful," Zyx'thala said, their voice carrying harmonics that made nearby furniture creak with residual grief. "I thought perhaps that place might be here. But your people seem to have forgotten that tears, properly wept, can water the seeds of compassion."

They paused, their tentacles shimmering with what their translator identified as "profound cosmic disappointment."

When asked for comment, a Home Office spokesperson said: "The government remains committed to a fair but firm approach to interdimensional immigration. We cannot comment on individual cases, but would note that anyone who entered our reality illegally should return to their dimension of origin through proper channels."

When pointed out that Zyx'thala's dimension of origin no longer exists, having been entirely converted into a furniture showroom, the spokesperson paused before replying: "That sounds like a problem for the Interdimensional Court of Justice to resolve."

Outside the New Calais facility, Zyx'thala's shipping container sits among thousands of others, each containing beings who crossed impossible distances fleeing unimaginable horrors, only to discover that the sanctuary they sought was just another kind of cage.

The last surviving Memory Keeper of the Cosmic Weeping People now spends their days trying to remember the sound of their children's laughter, while the government debates whether their suffering is enough to merit compassion.

The irony would be beautiful, if only there were anyone else who could share the tears.

The case continues. Zyx'thala's appeal hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday, assuming their inter dimensional asylum claim doesn't collapse before then.

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Then, through what most scholars agree was either a catastrophic clerical error, an ill-advised wager on cosmic poker, or a combination of the two, the universe approved the creation of Life through its Change Board.

Life had been submitted on Form 7B as decorative, luminescent fungi, presumably because the submitter enjoyed the idea of bioluminescent mood-lighting across the cosmos. Somewhere along the chain of approvals, the “fungi” box was accidentally marked “sentient, carbon-based”, and an enthusiastic middle-management goddess signed off with a flourish.1

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Life, as it turned out, in its sentient and carbon-based form, was profoundly needy. It wanted connection, companionship, someone to look at the stars with, someone to argue with about the dishes. None of this was in the cosmic budget.

[Memo #3999, Cross-Departmental Note from the Office of Entropy: “We’re seeing increased population growth. More touching = more reproducing = more mouths. Our heat-death projections are now off by several billion years. Requesting urgent recalibration.”]

Consequently, the gods convened a project committee meeting to decide what to do with these annoying defects in their design.

After three aeons of debate, and an unfortunate catering incident involving ambrosia and a small black hole, the gods created the Department of Minor Cruelties, Sub-department: Love.2 The office was headed by a middle-management goddess whose name, lost to time, roughly translates as She Who Smirks While Filing Reports. Mortals call her the Goddess of Touch.

Her solution to the mortal problem was elegant, if predictably sadistic:

“Let there be touch,” she decreed, “so that mortals might feel the unbearable loneliness that exists between them.”

Her intervention was simple, diabolical, and approved with no dissenting votes (Committee Note: “Looked fine at the time”). The moment you touched another, found yourself in an embrace, leant close enough to hear another’s heartbeat—you feel it. The sheer abyss that lies between you and another, the unbearable truth that you are alone, forever trapped within your own skull. Thus, the Goddess of Touch mitigated the risk of mortal reproduction.

And it worked brilliantly. Humans immediately began touching everything in sight. They invented greetings, handshakes, high-fives, and a curious activity involving mouths. Even worse, they discovered dancing that was really just an excuse to bump into each other rhythmically. They went so far as to praise it endlessly in song and literature. But afterward—after the hand let go, the embrace ended, the body left the room—they discovered the lingering pain of an absent friend or lover. The hollowness where the warmth had been.3

[Internal Memo #221/Touch Division: Results: 100% effective. Subjects experience immediate euphoria followed by gnawing loneliness. Secondary outcomes include poetry, drunken confessions, and several new musical genres. Recommend expansion of programme.]

But here was the punchline no one foresaw: mortals embraced their longing. Instead of despair, they canonised it as love. Instead of quitting, they wrote sonnets, painted masterpieces, built whole civilisations around chasing the fleeting warmth of a hand.

Mortals, of course, began to argue amongst itself. Philosophers insisted that touch was compassion incarnate, a gift given by the Goddess of Touch. They sprung up huge celebrations and sacrificed goats in Her name. She filed all positive interpretations under “Collateral Damage” and went on to create several new sexually-transmittable diseases to further test the stability of the mortal system.

The Committee of Gods, of course, began drafting lessons learned.

Lessons Learned: Project LIFE-0062

Minutes from the Lessons Learned Session, Project LIFE-0062
Convened at: The Committee Room of Infinite Seating (Annex B).
Chair: The Auditor of Missteps, Provisional (acting).
Agenda: Assess outcomes of “Creation of Sentient Life” initiative, recommend improvements, file necessary forms to avoid another fiasco.

Observation 1: Mortals are resilient. All attempts to enforce despair as a compliance measure failed. Instead, they created art, wove cultural legacies, and built entire civilisations around the fleeting warmth of touch.

Observation 2: Touch generates exponentially more paperwork than any other mortal activity. Cross-departmental memos now exceed 12 billion per aeon, per mortal encounter.

Observation 3: Mortals do not interpret loneliness as despair. They embrace it. Love, longing, heartbreak—they treat them as features, not bugs.

Observation 4: Bureaucratic accountability is ineffective when gods enjoy sadism. Middle-management gods approve defects to observe them at scale; higher-echelon gods spend most meetings filing complaints about paperwork backlog.

Observation 5: The inhumanity is essential. Touch is only possible because mortals are forever separated by an impenetrable barrier of self. The Goddess of Touch ensured compliance by making touch simultaneously pleasurable and painful.

Recommendations for Phase 2: Project LIFE-0062

1. Ensure future design specifications are clearly separated from decorative fungi orders.

2. Assign sadistic goddesses to low-risk portfolio items only (e.g. mosquito design, tax codes).

3. Build contingency plans for mortal reinterpretation of suffering as art.

4. Launch Crisis Response Team for any backlog nostalgia items.4

And so, after the Lessons Learned session concluded—papers filed, forms 7B-7Z processed, and memos stamped with “URGENT: COSMIC”, the universe sighed. The Goddess of Touch, pleased, scheduled six more sexually-transmissible experiments for the upcoming fiscal aeon, while mortals continued to touch, love, long, and write poetry about it all.

It was, in every measurable sense, a bureaucratic and cosmic success.5

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Everyone did, they were an extra-dimensional nuisance, but Toliver hated them in the way you might hate a migraine with a personality. The monoliths weren’t majestic relics of alien and unknowable cultures. They were traffic. Monumental, inconsiderate traffic.

The latest offender was a blade of light shaped like an angry lozenge. It drifted through the skyline with the quiet authority of someone who knows you’ll be late for something important. Its glow was clinical. Its edges, contemptuous. It was less an object and more a reprimand from the universe.

Toliver’s skipper vibrated in the jetstream, stuck behind the thing. He typed a string of foul-mouthed messages into his console and fired them as bursts of information. They streaked into the monolith’s skin, flaring bright, then fading. The monolith did not react. They never do. Monoliths don’t speak humanoid languages. The Sovereign, his tyrannical overlords, had ruled this conclusively: monoliths are incapable of communication. And so it went: monoliths don’t acknowledge us, any more than mountains would acknowledge an ant if it tweeted at them.

Last year a Ranger swore one of the monoliths whispered his birth name. The Sovereign fined him three months’ wages and confiscated his implant, officially, for “insubordination.”

[SoverEIgn Broadcast #771-A]:
Thank you for using SoverEIgn - the finest in emergent intelligence.

Reminder: Monoliths are not sentient. They are not malicious. They are not angry lozenges deliberately testing your patience and sanity. Any suggestion to the contrary will be treated as disinformation and treason. Please report any unauthorised conversations with monoliths immediately. Treason carries a mandatory fine of 2,000 motes and the removal of your least important memory. SoverEIgn: Because obedience is freedom.

Toliver pressed his palms over his ears, though the messages were in his implants. It was an old habit - a reflex he couldn’t shake. His thoughts had company, and the company was chatty.

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Today mattered. Today, being stuck behind a monolith was catastrophic. Toliver had an interview with The Erst. They were a faction who operated across the stars, the Ranger of the Houses of Baefaldar. And The Erst was his way into the guild. A man so important his shadow had its own voting rights.

Toliver was already late, and each second that passed was only worsening his predicament.

So he did something reckless. He swung his skipper out of the jetstream, trying to slingshot past the monolith. For a brief, dazzling second, he thought he’d succeeded. Then spacetime folded around him like a damp napkin, and Toliver found himself right back behind the same glowing bastard. Again.

Toliver screamed into his visor, fired more warning beams, and dropped the skipper into freefall.

[SoverEIgn Safety Reminder]:
Do not attempt to overtake a monolith. Do not attempt to communicate with a monolith. Do not attempt to imagine a monolith naked. If you are imagining this right now, please report to your nearest Sovereign mind-cleansing station. The Sovereign will not be held liable for any neurological damage or psychotic episodes resulting from the mind-cleanse. Please seek a qualified doctor.

Below: Amaiur.

The orbiting cityscapes of Amaiur spread beneath him — floating skyscraper-islands, their surfaces bristling with neon and commerce. All basked in the glow of Baefaldar’s green moon. Poets call it the Emerald Heart. The Sovereign calls it a strategic resource. Both descriptions are accurate - in a fashion.

Traffic thickened: freighters, cruisers, mining barges, tourist liners. A dreadful symphony of waiting.

[Sovereign Travel Update]:

• Warning: Delays are infinite. Thank you for your compliance.

• Tourists are classified as “people” for taxation purposes only. Do not speak to them. Do not look at them. Do not fall in love with them.

• Reminder: All dreams must be declared upon docking. Undeclared dreams will be confiscated and resold as luxury entertainment.

The console clicked again: a cavalcade of noise firing from various networks, all vying to stream direct to his skipper and to his implant.

[Ad Break]:
Feeling tired? Feeling small? Feeling like a disposable unit in the universe’s infinite plan? Try Night Coffee™ — harvested from beans that have never seen sunlight, roasted over smouldering corpses of dissent, and guaranteed to keep you awake until you collapse in the line of duty. Night Coffee™: Because free will is exhausting.

Toliver muted the console. Or tried. The mute button was cosmetic — a toggle installed by the Sovereign on all spacecraft to give the illusion of choice, but functionally it only alerted when the messaging needed to be more targeted.

[SoverEIgn Lifestyle Update]:
Congratulations, Citizen #442-772-Toliver! You have successfully muted this message. For your comfort, Sovereign has doubled the broadcast volume. Remember: silence is treason.

Toliver groaned.

“Fantastic. At least the voices in my head used to let me have an isolated thought.”

The adverts came harder now, jagged and insistent:

[Ad Break]:

Feeling like a statistic in someone else’s prophecy? Try BlissPills™. Side effects include nausea, devotion, and spontaneous pledges of eternal loyalty to the Collective. All Hail, the Sovereign. BlissPills™: Happiness without the burden of joy.

Toliver slammed the console. The surface made an angry hiss, as his frustration had clearly dislodged something important. The stream continued:

[SoverEIgn Warning]:

Do not strike Sovereign property. The console feels pain. It has filed a complaint against you.

He laughed bitterly. “Good. Maybe it can do my interview for me instead.”

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Toliver threaded through the flow. Every ship hummed the same note: anticipation. For docking. For freedom. For distraction. For the illusion of choice.

Above, the green moon glowed like an autopsy lamp. Official Sovereign records describe it as “a celestial body.” He dared not think too hard, as all thoughts were incendiary and tax-deductible.

[SoverEIgn Safety Reminder]:

Do not speak to miners. Do not speak to tourists. Do not speak to yourself. Talking to yourself is an unauthorised act of self-reflection. Self-reflection has been proven to be treasonous. We would advise against this.

Toliver scoffed at the idea. “Honestly, who’s got time for a single thought with you blaring in my ear?”

He sank deeper into the queue. He checked the time. He was, shockingly, even later than he was before.

[Ad Break]:

Feeling small? Feeling irrelevant? Feeling like an unnoticed speck in an infinite void controlled by powers beyond your comprehension? Try Cosmic Life Insurance™. For a small monthly payment, we guarantee your death will be officially recognised by our records. Because what is mortality, really, if no one files the paperwork? Cosmic Life Insurance™: Your family deserves bureaucracy.

The green moon loomed above.

Toliver adjusted his collar. He was late. He would meet the Erst, and when asked why he was so goddamn late, he would have to say the forbidden thing in his defence: “I was trapped behind a Monolith. It was a piss-take, and didn’t care a damn about my appointment.”

[SoverEIgn Broadcast #∞]:

Monoliths are not traffic. They are not lozenges. They are not migraines with personalities. They are Sovereign. They are your mothers. They are your children. They are your destiny. You are late. You are always late. You will always be late. We love you, Toliver. We love your delays. We love your obedience.

The console fell silent, finally.

Somewhere high above, the monolith drifted on, glowing, indifferent, and entirely in compliance with the law.

“Well,” Toliver said, voice resigned. “It’s a unique kind of love.”

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